By MAX BEARAK
A manual scavenger in Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh in 2013.Courtesy of Rashtriya Garima AbhiyanA manual scavenger in Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh in 2013.

NEW DELHI — Last month, human rights advocates should have rejoiced after the central government enacted the most stringent law against what is euphemistically called manual scavenging, which is the removal of human waste with bare hands.

India’s widespread absence of flush toilets and sewer lines means much of the country’s human waste must be scraped out by hand, and then carried in baskets to dump sites. The people who carry out this dehumanizing task, almost exclusively women from the Dalit castes, experience severe discrimination. Among the Dalits, those who are born into the lowest castes handle these jobs and are put under immense social pressure to take up the occupation themselves.

Since independence, discrimination based on caste has been banned and a law banning manual scavenging was passed in Parliament in 1993, but it didn’t ban dry toilets and had no employment aid for former workers. It has gone largely unenforced.

Given that the new law prohibits the hiring of such workers and provides alternative job training, one would have expected human rights advocates like Ashif Shaikh, who has devoted 12 years to getting a stronger law passed, to feel a sense of accomplishment.

“We are happy about the new law,” he said. But the specifics of implementation, which are decided by government committees, were “rubbish,” he said.

For instance, the text of the new law includes provisions for the rehabilitation of scavengers through a one-time cash stipend, plus access to scholarships and free vocational training. But the law’s rules, which spell out how the law will be carried out, don’t reflect the ambitious spirit of the law itself, according to Mr. Shaikh.

“If you look at the rules, the word rehabilitation isn’t even used once,” he said. “When we asked the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment about the lack of any specifics in the rules as to rehabilitation, they said, ‘We are preparing separate schemes for that.’ But schemes are not law, which we can hold accountable in court.”

Mr. Shaikh and his fellow activists did have high hopes at one time that the new law would have enough teeth to eradicate these jobs, which are held by around 300,000 Dalits, according to government estimates. (Some Dalit rights activists say it could easily be triple that number.)

The organization that Mr. Shaikh founded, Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan (National Campaign for Dignity), led a campaign last year in which 1,000 former manual scavengers traveled from village to village across 18 states for two months, persuading other women to leave the job and join them in “liberating” others. Mr. Shaikh said 5,000 more women ended up accompanying them to their final destination in Delhi.

This caught the attention of policy makers, including Jairam Ramesh, the current Minister of Rural Development. Mr. Shaikh decided to capitalize on the momentum by bringing some of his newly “liberated” scavengers to knock on the doors of more than 50 members of Parliament who represented their districts. That way, the lawmakers could not claim that manual scavenging had been eradicated in their jurisdictions.

Former manual scavengers burning baskets used to collect human waste at a rally in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on Nov. 30, 2012. Courtesy of Rashtriya Garima AbhiyanFormer manual scavengers burning baskets used to collect human waste at a rally in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on Nov. 30, 2012.

Mr. Shaikh excitedly recounted a morning when Meenakshi Natarajan, a Congress Party lawmaker from Madhya Pradesh, served him and former manual scavengers breakfast in her living room. Dalits, let alone manual scavengers, are traditionally not allowed to enter the homes of higher caste people.

Mr. Shaikh said these efforts by his organization and other Dalit activists are what led to the drafting of the most recent law. But they didn’t have power to specify how the law should be carried out.

He pointed to the one chapter in the rules that deals with rehabilitation, while never using that word. It has only one clause, stating that former manual scavengers will be given a one-time “cash assistance,” without specifying by whom, when or how much.

If implemented, the new law would severely curtail the use of dry toilets, also known as insanitary latrines, as it carries high fines and the possibility of jail time for those who employ manual scavengers or who fail to replace latrines that require manual cleaning. Those households using insanitary latrines will be held responsible for converting or demolishing them at their own cost, or the authorities under the orders of district magistrates will convert the latrines and recover the cost from the owner.

Furthermore, offices of district magistrates around the country are required to survey existing dry toilets by Feb. 6, and their subsequent destruction must take place within six months of that date.

In a phone interview last month, Sanjeev Kumar, joint secretary for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, which sponsored the law, assured that these deadlines were “very strict” and that the government would spare no effort to enforce the new law, albeit mostly through existing government programs.

“There is no need to worry about the specifics,” said Mr. Kumar. “Money won’t even be a consideration, not a barrier at all.”

However, Manjula Pradeep, executive director of Navsarjan Trust, a Dalit rights nonprofit based in Gujarat, said that to her knowledge, with two weeks until the survey deadline, preparations haven’t yet begun in any state.

“With national elections coming up, I think government is content to simply have passed the law,” she said. “Meanwhile, state governments continue to deny the widespread presence of manual scavengers in their states and use that as an excuse to delay new surveys indefinitely.”

She used her own state as example, where the government has contended that Gujarat has no manual scavengers, despite two independent surveys that found over 10,000 of them.

The central government, for its part, insists that it is committed to eliminating those jobs. “There can’t be a greater blot on India than the existence of manual scavenging,” Mr. Ramesh, the rural development minister, said in an interview. “Manual scavenging shows us how caste is still very much an Indian reality, and of how some of the system’s worst vestiges are still with us.”

But Mr. Shaikh, having lost faith in the central government’s assurances, said his organization will now focus on state-level conventions in an attempt to pressure state governments to act upon the new law.

Along with Mr. Shaikh and Ms. Pradeep, Bezwada Wilson completes the tripartite of activists who have been at the forefront of working to end the practice of manual scavenging both on the ground and through law. Mr. Wilson was born into a manual scavenging family and became one of the founders of Safai Karmachari Andolan, a people’s movement that aims to eradicate manual scavenging.

Out of the three activists, he is the most radical and also the most distrusting of the government. He has already begun planning how to incorporate the expected failure to meet the Feb. 6 deadline into expansive public interest litigation against the central government.

Mr. Wilson said he has given up on using political channels to accomplish his goals. “Really, the government may not have success anyway through laws,” he said. “It’s better if people like me directly go and speak these people’s language. When I go. I tell them, ‘There are 130 crore [1.3 billion] people in this country, and just like you most of them are poor. But only so many of them are scavenging. There are ways to live outside of this, even as a poor person,’ ” he said, pacing around his office. “Sometimes they don’t think they can just be a regular poor person.”

He settled back into his chair and shook his head. “Still! The government should make an actual vision,” he said. “Tell us it will take 10 years. Just be honest.”

Read more here – http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/new-law-to-ban-manual-removal-of-human-waste-disappoints/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=asia&_r=1

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