At least 77%of India’s 38,000 sewer and septic workers, according to data from the mechanized sanitation ecosystem (NAMASTE) for India’s national action, is from the Dalit community.
Dalits are a historically marginalized groups, including the lowest level of India’s centuries -old discriminatory caste hierarchy.
Namaste is an organization that claims to protect sanitation workers to promote the use of mechanized cleaning machines and to get subsidy to reduce manual laboratory.
In 2020, the Government of India announced measures to eliminate dangerous exercises of manual scavenging – removing human enthusiasm from toilets, septic tanks and sewer – until August 2021.
The initiative was part of the “Clean India Initiative” launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which aims to implement laws banning manual scavenging.
‘Stranded’ in cleaning Dalits
However, despite the ban, this dirty work is going on, is done by Dalits on a large scale.
Despite their efforts to get other municipal jobs, many Dalits have claimed that bees have done other things, to implicate them in effective roles.
“The government refused to accept social reality that India is a caste-based society fundamental,” said Bezwara Wilson, a advocating advocate-advocating sanitation worker in India (SKA).
Wilson told DW, “What they claim are less about the facts and more about their own opinion.”
Wilson said, “Manual is a cruel form of ‘rehabilitation’ to manual scavengers to buy the subjects of machines under Namaste Scheme.”
“Instead of abolishing caste-based recruitment, it simply prepares it under a modern name-namast, which is disguised as progress.”
Cast and exclusion
Dalits are usually given the most manless and dangerous jobs, which are considered “impure” by religious and social standards. Thesis jobs are passed through generations, the family is implicated in the cycle of social exclusion and economic lack.
Even among the Dalits, Valmiki sub-caste, historically the joyous socio-political and economic boycott, suppression and violence.
Vivek Kumar, Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said, “The caste is seen as a result of someone’s previous works, which reflects the scavengers for the life of others to clean the waste.”
Kumar said, “It is a mask of the harsh reality of discrimination by calling it ‘spiritual duty’ or ‘noble service for society’.
Pilgrimage
Dalits often experience housing, education and separation in social contact. The relationship between caste and hygiene work limits Dalits from advancing the social ladder – preventing their access to other jobs and opportunities.
Kumar said that caste has not gone away with modernity or urbanization. Instead, it has spread to the urban center and entered modern institutions, such as industry, civil society, politics and bureaucracy.
“As long as the cast as a cultural capital for ‘upper castes’ we cannot finish it,” Heer said.
Kumar believes that “dignity of labor” should be taught from primary to higher education so that the old can be carried forward
Kumar concluded,
Edited by: Keith Walker
