This article is part of India’s Dirty Secret, a series on manual scavenging and sewage worker deaths. Based on a study of the International Labour Organisation, Delhi, it brings together stories of families whose members died during sewage cleaning, and also highlights failures in the implementation of the various laws to protect their rights, dignity and life.
Rakesh Valmiki, 28
Krishna Nagar Colony, Sanjay Nagar
Mathura
May 16, 2018
The two brothers, Vikalp Valmiki and Rakesh Valmiki, did all they could to find stable and decent work in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, the city where they were born and raised. But they were always confined by the limits that were set by their Valmiki caste, which was ritually assigned the socially most demeaning task of manual scavenging or cleaning human excreta.
Vikalp had been once hired as a bus conductor at a nearby school. A few days into the job, he was asked to leave as one of his supervisors learned that he was from the Valmiki community. Rakesh ran a butcher’s shop, but could not make much money. But for the most part, they worked as casual and on-call sanitation workers in a residential colony, collecting garbage, cleaning doors, drains, streets and staircases.
They had to begin work early, as teens, because their father had taken ill....
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