Anokhi cannot forget the first time she cleaned human feces. ‘The first thing I did was throw up.’ Then came diarrhea, lack of appetite and headaches. She spent 17 years cleaning latrines, twenty of them a day for 400 rupees a month (€5.60). ‘My sister in law made me start and my family threatened me, so I couldn’t quit’, she recalls.
A law passed in 1993 and another one in 2013 banned this degrading work in India. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said this practice was ‘one of the greatest blemishes in the country’s development’ and promised to eradicate it. In 2014, the Supreme Court acknowledged that manual cleaning of feces was still common and that it was a violation of human rights.
However, the laws have not prevented hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, from continuing to clean latrines. The International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) estimates that 1.3 million people do it. With a basket, a brush, a spatula and their bare hands, they remove feces from homes, train stations, drains, septic tanks, sewers or railways.
The collectors were born Dalits, ‘untouchables’, in the lowest rung of the Hindu social pyramid. If they didn’t ‘inherit’ the job from their parents, they started when they got married. This was Priyanka’s case, who began following her mother-in-law’s orders. ‘The worst part was the monsoon. With the rain, the load ran down the basket and trickled on my head and clothes. The smell never went away. It was always with me’. Her mother in law says ‘I had no other option, I had to do it. I did it for 36 years’.
Due to this “family legacy”, manual scavengers are ostracized. The social humiliation they are subjected to is almost worse than the job they do, beginning in the houses they clean. ‘I always had to keep a distance (from my employers), not even our shadows could touch, and they threw food at me from above’, says Savatri. Despite the shame, the workers do not leave the upper-caste families that feed them and give them old clothes.
Civil organizations like Sulabh International are supporting these workers to join mainstream society. ‘The first challenge is to free them from that task; then, we give them access to education and help them develop other skills’, says founder Bindeshwar Pathak, a sociologist who stresses the need for ‘higher castes to respect (Dalits’) rights and allow them to come into temples, bathe in sacred rivers or eat with others’.
Usha did manual scavenging with her mother for more than 30 years. One day, her path crossed with Pathak’s. ‘I was suspicious at first, but in 2003 I saw the Center he built for us and I knew he was different. At the Center, more than 100 ex-scavengers learn to read and write and receive vocational training. Usha, now president of Sulabh International, encourages other women to escape a life amidst human waste. She is no longer an outcast.
Why are all the women dressed in blue? Sulabh answers that ‘It’s the color of the sky, of freedom. Before, they were imprisoned by society, now they are free’.
Source: elmundo.es
