The frequent deaths of India’s sewer workers isn’t a governance failure – they are rooted in caste

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.

You might wonder why faceless and impoverished working men continue to die in sewers with unrelenting regularity – even in the National Capital Region – and why there seems nothing that Central, state and local governments do to end this. Some illuminating and gravely incriminating indications of what governments are not doing and should do come through in a significant and carefully researched study by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights.

The PUDR set out to investigate incidents of death of workers who died while cleaning sewers or septic tanks in the National Capital Regions of Delhi in incidents spanning two years. Their findings are remarkably similar to those which emerge from the stories which we have been reporting in these columns, based on our studies (by the Centre for Equity Studies and the International Labour Organisation).

The roll call of deaths in sewers and septic tanks which the PUDR team studied is grim and sobering,...

Read more

from Scroll.in https://ift.tt/2Kqn0pN