“When it comes to profit over safety, profit usually wins.”

– James Frazee

Sanitation work and the hierarchy through which it ope-rates is the starkest example of how caste works in India. While a majority of the actual hands-on workers are Dalits from communities engaged ancestrally in sanitation work, the rest would be Muslims from the poorer castes and migrant Bahujans. One wouldn’t find anyone from the dominant castes engaged in this profession. Dominant caste involvement in sanitation work would be as contractors and supervisory employees of the relevant government and non-government bodies. This is a key factor in the silence around sanitation work, in the invisibilisation of the workers and how they are made to cope with hazardous working conditions as a daily routine, without even basic safety equipment—indeed, in the very normality with which all of this is seen. Out of sight, out of mind.

Within this overall picture, the case of a specific community might strike you as particularly anomalous at first glance. That’s because it relates to Tamil Nadu, a state whose social polity has been built on the foundation of a century-old anti-caste movement. It’s a matter of perverse irony that the situation of sanitation workers in Tamil Nadu is one of the worst in the country. The Arundhatiyar community forms the bulk of the sanitation workers in the state. The rest are mostly from other equally or more marginalised and smaller Dalit subcastes like Kattu Naicker, Irular and Kuravar. Despite Tamil Nadu having seen a strong socio-political Dalit assertion within the broader Dravidian movement, Arundhatiyars have been left unrepresented and largely unmobilised. Their socio-economic indices are far behind other dominant Dalit communities of Tamil Nadu, like the Parayars or Pallars. The two fundamental reasons this can be att-ributed to are, perversely enough, casteism and linguistic chauvinism. The Arundhatiyars are a community consisting of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada speakers. In the words of Raees Mohammed, general secretary of the All India Sanitation Workers Self-Respect Union, based in Nilgiris, “They are those who do the most essential work, but never became part of the larger Tamil society’s imagination. In other words, they are ‘outsiders’ to Tamil society, like the toilet which is part of the house but will always be kept away or outside.”

Tamil Nadu has reportedly recorded 46 sewer deaths officially between 2016-2020, as against the actual tally of around 60. The death of three more men in Katrambakkam near Sriperumbudur on February 15 gave the world a glimpse of the unvarnished truth. None of three men—Murugan, Bhakyaraj and Arumugam—had any safety gear while ent-ering the septic tank that killed them. Murugan entered the tank first, Bhakyaraj and Arumugam entered when they did not hear from him. And so, we have three more names in a list nobody is even drawing up properly. Already, according to a central government survey, around 206 people had died while working the sewers in Tamil Nadu between 1993 and 2019—the limitation of this data is that it does not represent the actual tally as the survey was conducted only in 170 districts in 18 states. These latest deaths have had one more effect: Tamil Nadu has now surpassed Uttar Pradesh in sewer deaths.

Tamil Nadu’s first systematic failure is in not recognising and defining who manual scavengers are. The second is a stark invisibility of any of the provisions of the Manual Scavenging Act 2013. Thirdly, a lack of guidelines in preparing an integrated list of families of victims for rehabilitation, so they can receive compensation. What are the grounds on which some families who lost an earning member have still not been granted this ex gratia payment? The state government has also to clarify why there’s a differential in compensation amounts paid to various victims’ families.

Above all, the state needs to draw up a formulated plan of how it’s planning to eradicate manual scavenging from its jurisdiction. It also needs to prepare a response to the call for mechanisation by the Centre. Tamil Nadu needs to square up to the fact that it lacks any social security scheme for manual scavengers. It is absolutely shameful that deaths continue to happen as men are forced to enter septic tanks. What makes it doubly criminal is the absence of any move, even in 2021, to equip those ordained by India’s caste regime to carry out this dangerous task with any type of safety gear. What the state must do forthwith is shed this murderous apathy and get to work. First, by preparing a comprehensive list of manual scavengers operating on railway tracks around Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kanchipuram and Dharmapuri. Then, by creating a rapid response team to track cases of sewer deaths, following up with family members and creating processes for immediate and direct outreach during an emergency. Safety gear and mechanisation must follow. We need clear answers on its budgetary allocation and actual expenditure on the Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers. A list of toilets turned into dry toilets because of lack of water supply also needs to be prepared.

All of this is eminently doable. The state government needs to launch independent surveys or collaborate with researchers on the number of dry latrines on the periphery of the cities and in semi-urban and rural areas. This entire policy push must be put into action through the support of sanitation workers and existing unions. The safai karmacharis, the actual toilet cleaners, need to be given as much importance as the building of toilet infrastructure or rushing to call cities ‘free of open defecation’. Such an outreach will give the state government a real-time understanding of ground realities. Much of the muddiness around these issues arises out of lack of data. This can be erased by starting with the petitions of organisations like the Safai Karmachari Andolan, then building from there.

Till all this happens, Tamil Nadu will be watched closely. Each and every sewer death matters. Each one of them is also a glaring sign of a complete lack of political and social will to eradicate manual scavenging—those who rule the roost amid this abdication are those contractual employers who force men to enter septic tanks in an unauthorised way. The way to address this is through legislation. Criminal and civil liability for deaths and sickness arising out of sanitation work must be pinned on each of the stakeholders in the chain that profits from it.

Why hasn’t this happened yet? It goes deeper than ordinary apathy. Tamil Nadu’s social polity doesn’t seem to have the space to own up to one of its major faultlines: casteism. That is the sole reason that governs sanitation work and the conspiracy of silence around it. Who gets employed? How do they get treated? The answers are ultimately structural. The criminal impunity that Tamil Nadu allows itself on this front owes to only one factor: caste and linguistic chauvinism. It’s time that changed.

(Views are personal)

Pragya Akhilesh is the national convenor of Rehabilitation Relief Initiative. Bobby Kunhu is a lawyer and researcher