Civil organizations state that over a million people’s job is to empty latrines in India. They collect and transport the stools by hand without any protection, in a country where 597 million people have no toilets. They all belong to the most marginalized caste in the country, the Dalits or untouchables. Although the class division system was abolished in India in 1950, it still exists in practice.
In spite of attempts to end this work by the government, various organizations and the international community, they “have been derailed by discrimination and local complicity”, according to the South Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “People work emptying latrines because they assume that their caste must fulfill this role and usually can’t get any other jobs”, she says.
HRW has found that women do not receive wages in cash but food scraps, some grain at harvest time, used clothing or access to land for cattle, always at the discretion of the families they serve. Intermon Oxfam reported that those who do receive a salary usually do not get more than 30 rupees (0.50 €) per toilet per month. The children of these workers do not get an education because of their extreme poverty, and many of those who are enrolled in school end up dropping out due to severe discrimination.
Human Rights Watch also warns of the health consequences that collecting fecal matter entails - nausea, headaches, respiratory and skin diseases, anemia, diarrhea, vomiting, jaundice, trachoma and carbon monoxide poisoning, to name a few. The NGO wants the new government to undertake a comprehensive assessment of all agreements in force intended to offer this caste financial aid, scholarships, legal assistance, etc.
However, what needs to be changed so that the enforcement of laws is not hindered are the entrenched cultural patterns of a society that divides itself in people of more or less worth. Despite being a slow process, this must be done with the people themselves irrespective of caste so that the boundaries of this social division may progressively become less rigid.
Source: elpais.com
