According to the data collected by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), one person dies cleaning sewers and septic tanks every five days in the country. NCSK, a statutory body set up for the welfare of sanitation workers, reported that since January 2017, manual scavenging has killed 123 people.
This is first official attempt to account for the deaths of sanitation workers. The data has been collected by compiling English and Hindi news reports and the data provided by a few state governments, reported The Indian Express. However, officials agree that this number is a huge underestimation since regional language newspapers have not been included.
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“The death count is based on figures we could collate from a few states and mostly English and Hindi newspapers. There might have been several instances of similar stories in regional language papers which were weren’t able to account for,” an official involved in the exercise told IE.
The highest number of deaths have been reported in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, and Gujarat, respectively. While Maharashtra has reported only such two deaths, according to the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011, rural Maharashtra alone has 65,181 households where at least one member is employed as a manual scavenger. This makes Maharashtra a 35% holder of 1.82 lakhs of such households in India.
On the other hand, Madhya Pradesh, the state that has second highest number of manual scavengers in rural areas (23,105 as per SECC), does not show any deaths in the NCSK data.
“We have repeatedly asked states to identity those involved in these jobs but the states deny the existence of manual scavenging as the practice is banned under law. As a result, in many cases, the families of the dead don’t even get the compensation,” NCSK chairperson Manhar Valjibhai Zala told IE.
The data is available only from 170 districts of 18 states, and even this includes sewer cleaners and other forms of manual scavenging in urban areas. As part data collection process, central government teams were to organise district level camps where manual scavengers could come and self-declare their status, which would then be compiled confirmed by the state governments.
However, Only 109 out of 170 districts have filed a response while only 62 districts have acknowledged the existence of at least one manual scavenger.
The centre has repeatedly disregarded the plea for extending the survey to 300 districts as well as to include those who clean sewer-septic tanks, said Bezwada Wilson, founder of Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA) and part of the team that assisted the central government in carrying the survey in 170 districts.
As per the records of the post-mortem reports of the deaths maintained by SKA, the actual death count since January 2017 is about 300.
“Their deaths are under-counted and so are their lives. Even the National Crime Records Bureau was agreeable to our suggestion that they should document the deaths separately. But nothing has happened on the front, either,” Wilson told IE.
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