Shit. Faeces. Excreta. Refuse.

The thing that we turn our face from and recoil. The stuff we seek to remove by vigorously scrubbing with soap when we come in contact with it. The stuff we keep away from dinner conversation. The stuff we bring up in casual conversation to convey disgust, horror, distaste, disapproval, and even disbelief or comic relief.

We know where our food comes from—farms, that is, not supermarkets. The farmer’s labour, first and foremost, is the source. Commerce and art have come together over the years to hail the farmer, the farmer’s produce, the farm’s idyllic setting and the romance it kindles.

Crap. We produce it every single day. It is disposed of with mundane regularity. We are all grateful for this regularity (and if you wonder why I say this, ask anyone whose drainpipes are clogged). We do not care to think what happens once we are done, flushed and washed—the story of the urban well-to-do crapper.

However, there are thousands across the country who make sure your nightsoil doesn’t turn into a nightmare—people who, to date, are called upon to enter manholes, and unclog drains by physically removing offensive materials such as plastic that we have carelessly thrown away and have found their way into open drains. They risk their lives, utterly unprotected from noxious fumes and disease and without the bare minimum personal protective clothing or equipment. Compelled by poverty and perhaps inured by alcohol, abetted by non-implementation of prohibitions on manual scavenging and aggravated by poor civic sense, these people are shunned for their caste and the work they do—they lead extreme lives in order for our ‘normal’ lives not to be interrupted. Their right to life and livelihood is on a tight leash, in our hands, and so are their deaths.

It should be possible for a country like ours to bring the practice of manual scavenging to an end. I wonder why it persists.

Is it that our cities and towns, unplanned as they are, remain unamenable to technological solutions? Is the budget outlay needed to put a country-wide stop to this practice beyond our capacity? Or, does our notion of growth and development, in terms of GDP, have no compelling argument for such expense? Is it that our stubborn caste equations have consigned some to this wretched occupation and allied trades related to the disposal of others’ waste and discards? Doesn’t the government machinery tacitly perpetuate the status quo? Is it that our use of public spaces as dumping grounds, and the accumulated toxic wastes such as plastic therein find their way to the drains and choke them?

Are we so blinkered, so comfortably numb, so confident that someone somewhere will handle our shit that we don’t need to care, raise a voice, cut a cheque, act in solidarity, inject urgency … ?

Read more:

• Banning Manual Scavenging in India: A Long, Complex Passage (Down to Earth)
• Manual Scavengers: Existing in the Shade (Down to Earth)
• India’s Manual Scavenging Problem (The Hindu)
• The Manacles of Caste in Sanitation Work (The Hindu)

Image: Prince mamman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons