indo–asian news service
New Delhi, August 23: The death of 10 sanitation workers in the national capital alone has finally got people talking about a not so guarded secret: despite a ban on manual scavenging, sanitation workers are still made to go inside toxic sewers without any safety gear and with primitive tools to clean them.
Forty-year old Rishi Pal became the latest casualty of the pervasive apathy when he died Sunday inside a gutter of the LNJP Hospital that he was tasked to clean. He had descended inside the sewer without even a ladder, let alone any safety gear.
His colleagues at the hospital testified to press that there was nothing anomalous with the way Rishi Pal went about his business Sunday and that none of them were ever provided any safety gear while cleaning the sewers of the establishment.
“We are not given any safety gear; no oxygen mask, no gloves, no boots. They (the officials) know that if I refuse to go down the sewer they will have many others who can do the job. For them it’s like, either do the job or get out,” Mohammad Siraj, who has been a sanitation worker for more than 20 years, said at the LNJP hospital.
About 70 such sanitation workers are hired on contract by the Public Works Department, an agency under Delhi government, for three hospitals in the vicinity, including LNJP. The two others are Guru Nanak Eye Hospital and Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital. Another sanitation worker said that he was hired by a private contractor along with the rest to work for the government agency.
“PWD stopped employing sanitation workers on permanent basis long time back. All of us are hired on contract and are paid by cheque by the contractor,” said Hashamat Khan, who comes from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh to the hospital for work.
Apart from being made to work in perilous conditions, these workers do not have any sort of identification card or any proof that they are employed by the contractor for the PWD, which makes their status peculiarly vulnerable for exploitation.
“We have not been given any i-cards, or even a uniform. If I die today in a gutter my body can easily be discounted as an unclaimed one. Our lives don’t cost anything in their eyes,” said an infuriated Siraj who had just lost a senior and helpful colleague in Rishi Pal.
