With both hands holding the basket of human excrement on herhead, widowed grandmother Kela walks through a stream of sewage, up a mound ofwaste and then dumps the filth while cursing. "Nobody even pays us adecent wage!" she spits as she rakes mud and rubbish over her newlydeposited pile, one of several she drops in the course of her working daycleaning toilets as a "manual scavenger" in India. She and around 20other women in the village of Nekpur, 60 kilometres from New Delhi but a worldaway from its relative wealth, remove the contents of toilets daily using justtheir hands and a plastic shovel. Kela and her fellow scavengers in Nekpur livein a handful of mud houses, isolated from the rest of the village. They areconsidered low-caste even by fellow low-caste Hindus and are seen as theultimate "untouchables". Discrimination has eased recently but stillthey are prevented from keeping livestock and are sometimes stopped fromwalking near powerful people. "My life has passed doing this," Kela,a withered illiterate woman thought to be around 60, explained.
Nekpur, a few hours bumpy drive from Delhi, is the sort ofrural backwater found in Northern India where the estimated 200,000 scavengersnationwide continue to toil. Swarms of mosquitoes hover above open drains asnaked or barely clothed children play on the streets. Buffaloes outnumbervehicles in the streets.
The new legislation modifies the 1993 law -- whichcriminalised the scavengers -- raising the prospect of an end to a practiceseen as a medieval throwback with no place in modernising India. The new lawwould prohibit the building of non-flushing toilets that must be emptied byhand, and prescribes a one-year jail term and/or a fine of up to 50,000 rupeesfor anyone who employs a manual scavenger. It also requires local authoritiesto monitor the implementation of the law and sets out tough sanctions ifmunicipalities employ sewer cleaners without protective gear and equipment.
Bindeshwar Pathak, of the sanitation charity SulabhInternational, says the legislation could prove helpful, but that the finaltest will be on the ground. "In India there are many laws that have nothelped so far, like (the one to prevent) dowry. Dowry cases are still going on,there is child labour," he said.
The persistence of manual scavenging can be traced todeep-rooted factors which continue to afflict India despite three decades ofhigh economic growth. Caste-based discrimination and the notion of"untouchability" in rural India persists more than 60 years afterindependence hero Mahatma Gandhi called it the "greatest blot uponHinduism".
A 2011 survey by the Central Pollution Control Boardrevealed only 160 out of nearly 8,000 towns had sewerage systems and a sewagetreatment plant. But the women in Nekpur are among the lucky ones in theirprofession, however, benefiting from a rehabilitation progamme with a chance ofsuccess. Since June 2012, they have been re-trained by Sulabh and are nowmaking soaps and candles, holding out hope that they and their children mightescape a destiny of humiliation and disease.
