Stinking
filth: The political economy of scavenging
Vijay Prashad
Himal
March-April 2006
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
Navsarjan 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.
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