Stinking filth: The political economy of scavenging
In late January 2006, the sewer ran over. Our well-heeled street in Chennai pulsated with excreted lava. A work crew arrived to lift the manholes and break the pavement. By mid-morning, they had put pipes into the sewer and had begun pumping out as much of the sludge as possible. The smell overpowered everyone. Then a few of the men and women put plastic bags over their hair, lifted up their lungis and saris, and descended into the sewer.
They stood in the black treacle of shit, piss and other assorted matter, using bamboo sticks as oars to move the sewage around, and then buckets to pass it out to be deposited on the street. A little later, they left the holes to wash their feet and hands with water from a white plastic container. One man gave me a big smile and said, "dirty," in. English.
I do not speak Telugu, the language of these contracted labourers from Andhra Pradesh. The municipality does not hire them directly, because the work they must do is illegal according to 1993 national legislation. Nonetheless, there are now about 10,000 such workers in Chennai, most of whom live in one of the 150 slums within the city's precincts. The contract labourer said dirty, and even as the word was nowhere near sufficient to describe what he had experienced, it sufficed. It was dirty. The whole thing was dirty: the sewage, the job, and the coexistence between humans as technology-saving devices and technology to save labour. Why does the municipality use human labour, when it could turn to machines to clear the drains? It took Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to India in 1952 to introduce the long broom for street-sweepers.
Why does Indian civil society tolerate such a reduction of the human being?
Gandhi, for all his limitations, raised the question of scavenging and cleanliness onto the platform of Indian nationalism back in 1901. Over the next four decades, his timid approach to scavenging and untouchability nonetheless confirmed the outrageousness of the practice within the ambit of the vision for a republican India. Between 1949 and 1976, five state-commissioned reports came to the same conclusions: scavenging continues; it is barbaric; and the state must act to end it.
The 1949 Barve Commission ended with a final word to the scavengers themselves. The practice continues, it argued, "because the scavengers have submissively put up with its dirty nature and never raised their voices against it, as if it were ordained for them by birth." History was thus cheapened when India's first commission on the problem — chaired by a Brahmin no less — turned the onus of scavenging onto the scavenger. It is your problem, the government suggested, because you do not refuse to do this job. The silence on the millennia of struggle against Brahmanism, and the obliviousness to the political economy of scavenging, dramatically reduced the Barve Commission's recommendations. From on high, the commission propounded: "But they should know that, as human beings and as equal citizens of free India, they have a right to insist that the condition of scavenging work shall be such, that it should be capable of being done by any self-respecting person."
Organising labour
The 'right to insist' has been claimed by safai karamcharis (manual scavengers) ever since the Barve Commission's findings, whether through the medium of caste associations, trade unions, political parties, or newly created abolitionist groups. These last have received some attention in the past few years, before and after the World Conference against Racism at Durban in 2001. The Naysarjan Trust (NST) in Gujarat and the more militant Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA) in Andhra Pradesh are both committed to various forms of direct action to end the use of pit latrines and other sorts of sanitation technology that require manual scavenging.
Gita Ramaswamy's India Stinking and Mari Marcel Thekaekara's Endless Filth provide a survey of the legislative failures and barbarism of the practice. The former introduces the reader to the SKA, while the latter introduces the NST. Both books profile the leading forces in each of these respective organisations — the SKA's Bezwada Wilson and the NST's Martin Macwan — both of whom have fought hard to motivate civil society to push against the recalcitrance of state authorities.
"Why should we organise [the scavengers]?", Wilson asks Ramaswamy. "To demand better wages and living conditions? I am criticised for being anti-institution, anti-organisation. But our strength does not grow with a powerful organisation of manual scavengers. We can only be powerful when there are no manual scavengers." Macwan is similarly forthright in his discussions of the government's various commissions: "What totally devastated me was that they were not agitating against the practice. They were merely begging the Panchayat to give them more brooms to prevent their hands from being soiled with shit. They didn't dream of eliminating scavenging."
Scavenging, after all, cannot be reformed; it must be abolished. But not only has it not been abolished, it has been strengthened. While both Ramaswamy and Thekaekara indict the Indian civil society and government on moral grounds, that is not enough: one has to seek out the problem elsewhere than morality. In both books, abolitionists enter a neighbourhood to break down a pit latrine. There, they are confronted by the residents of the area, who remonstrate with them because they have no access to any other toilet, a particular problem for the women. "You people have big houses, so you can have toilets inside your homes," one person tells the SKA in India Stinking. This is typical, and it is meaningful. To moralise against scavenging does not address the fundamental questions of uneven access to public facilities, or the use of labour as a cheap substitute for technology.
Caste and economics
This tendency towards morality comes about because of a lack of linkage between Brahmanical ideas about pollution and the political economy of sanitation. If the problem was only in Brahmanical prejudice, then a moral condemnation of the ideas might produce an ideological shift. The problem vests equally in the ideology of pollution-purity, however, and on the state's reproduction of caste oppression through its agencies like the sanitation department. As such, it is worth taking seriously the complaints of those who rely upon the degradation of other humans for their own cleanliness.
To moralise against one section of the poor to help another is insufficient. The state neglects the sanitary needs of the working poor, and then provides them with bare-minimum services on the backs of the manual scavengers. Rather than spend money on technologies that can remove humans from direct contact with the excreta of others, the local government relies on human beings from certain caste communities to bear the social costs. Municipalities spend far more on water supply than on sewage removal, and disproportionately more on the enclaves of the wealthy than on the slums of the poor. These economic decisions are rife with caste implications, because to run sewage removal on the cheap means that administrators replace available technology with human labour. This is the inhumanity of the political economy of scavenging, and it has a long history. In 1912, an English officer suggested that the colonial municipality must be "guided not by what is the best system of sanitation, but by what is the best system which the Municipal funds can afford." This logic continues.
In 1993, the Lok Sabha finally took up the matter and passed a stringent law banning the use of manual scavenging. The SKA and NST act on the basis of that law, but they have found that only a statutory agency would be able to break the very pit latrines that are now illegal. Indolent, insolvent and caste-ridden governmental agencies, however, have not taken this initiative. The law also passed just as the Indian state began to liberalise. How will Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) funding create water-seal latrines, when HUDCO and its ilk are under their own financial constraints? Liberalisation has meant the decline of the state's regulatory capacity. The 1993 act defrayed the abolition of scavenging onto the individual states of the union at a time when government agencies and state budgets were being scaled back. This needs to be part of the context of any discussion of abolition, and explains why almost a decade-and-a-half later, there are still over 1.3 million people who work in this sector. The "worst kind of oppression and indignities," according to the 1994 National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, continues. For neither the first time nor the last would this government body call the practice of manual scavenging "a blot on the face of the nation."
The moral voice is necessary. The realist descriptions of the inhumanity are compelling. Both of these are well provided for in India Stinking and Endless Filth. Ultimately, however, humanism alone fails the scavengers, offering no programme for their liberation. Such a plan would require a forthright look at the nexus between the political economy of scavenging and the pollution-purity ideology of Brahmanism. Anything less makes us, the bourgeois reader, feel better, but does little for the objects of our concern.