Death of sanitation workers in Delhi exposes the hypocrisy and failure of government

News24xx.com -  Every day hundreds of men descend into the putrid, foul smelling gutters of the national capital without any safety gear. The number is staggering for the rest of the country.

Those who die during the duty are replaced by others, waiting to put their lives in danger just to earn a living for themselves and their families.

Every week young men line up for Rs 200 (IDR 42 thousand) that they get to clean 20-25 gutters. They do this each day of a week, till they fall sick due to poisonous gasses in sewers or die of asphyxiation.

While sewage cleaning has become mechanised in some parts of the country, the government figures suggest nearly 8,00,000 people still work as sewage cleaners.

In Delhi, sewage travels across 5,600- kilometre long sewer lines at the speed of one metre per second. There are more than 1.5 lakh manholes for the effluents released by the Capital’s close to 19 million people.

Reports suggest that nearly 23,000 men and women die in India every year doing various kinds of sanitation work.

A research at Tata Institute of Social Sciences has found that 80% of the sewage cleaners die before age 60 because of work-related health problems. In Mumbai, an average of 20 sewer workers die each month from accidents, suffocation or exposure to toxic gases, the study found.

Rajesh, one of the survivors of the Lajpat Nagar sewage cleaning fiasco, which turned fatal for three, is left with severe injuries and is jobless for the last 10 days after he descended into a sewer and fell unconscious, only to be pulled up the last member after he stopped responding.

Hailing from Uttar Pradesh, he has a wife and an 18-year-old daughter to look after. Rajesh, with his family, is currently in hiding. He has been constantly receiving death threats from the members of his community who question his survival.

“You know our work is dirty. Filth and human excreta are obvious, sometimes we even come across dead animals like dogs, cats and rats. Broken bottles lurking in darkness mark our bodies with scars and cuts.”

The incident comes weeks after four sanitation workers died of asphyxiation while cleaning a septic tank in Ghitorni. Nine sanitation workers have died in Delhi in 2017, so far.

Toxic sewage gases claimed two more lives when two sanitation workers entered a septic tank without any safety gear at a mall in Anand Vihar on August 12.
Government & civic bodies in denial mode.

In stark contrast to reports, Delhi Jal Board says that the task of sewage cleaning is completely mechanised and that manual scavenging has not been in practice for almost a decade now in the capital.