Techno-fixes can't solve what is, at root, a social problem. Though it'll be great if machines can take over the grossest tasks of safai karamcharis (Illustration by Tanmoy Chakraborty)

A safai karamchari dies every five days in India. And from municipalities to governments-in states and at the Centre-to elected representatives, everybody just shifts the onus for doing something about it. The wretched manual scavengers briefly make news when there is a sewer death, due to asphyxiation or accident, but no authority is heard saying: 'This is our problem; we'll fix it.'

Technological innovations are welcome. It'll be great if machines can take over the grossest tasks of safai karamcharis. But techno-fixes won't solve the problem. Because, at root, it's not a technological problem; it is first a social problem and then an administrative one. The safai karamcharis come from castes like the Valmiki, which have a long history of manual scavenging and enduring discrimination. When you grow up in such a caste, you're condemned at birth. Your ability to stand up to injustice is rendered lame at birth.

Their conditioning is so deep that they don't break these shackles even if they manage to somehow escape scavenging work. They hide their caste identity even from their spouses, fearing discrimination. Can you imagine the need to hide your caste at that level of intimacy? Which technology, which app, which advertising campaign will fix this?

Manual scavenging is specifically banned under laws passed in 1993 and 2013. Why isn't the law enforced? The Supreme Court has ordered compensation of Rs 10 lakh for each family that loses a member to sewer cleaning work. Yet, compensation is received in barely 2 per cent of cases. We have documented 1,870 deaths while cleaning sewers in the past 10-15 years. Many of these cases go unreported.

In his book, Karmayog, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talks of manual scavenging as a "spiritual experience". I urge him to ask a manual scavenger if s/he feels even remotely spiritual while cleaning other people's excreta, whether the daily round feels like a pilgrimage. Without exception, they do it because there is no option, no alternative employment for those born into castes identified with scavenging. It's this kind of 'spiritual' whitewash that prevents the government from allocating money for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers. Even the little that is allocated is squandered on government departments, and more committees and surveys. These might provide employment to government surveyors but not to manual scavengers.

The same government can allocate Rs 2 lakh crore for a sanitation campaign to build toilets. Most such toilets have pits or septic tanks-50 million toilets means 50 million pits. Who will clean these? Valmikis, no doubt? The high-visibility Swachh Bharat media campaign gives the impression that all Indians are onboard in a new clean-up drive, but just check the caste antecedents of safai karamcharis who die. A government task force recently put out a new estimate of 53,000-odd manual scavengers in the country, but this is based on a survey of just 121 of 640 districts. It doesn't smell clean: our own estimate of the number of manual scavengers is closer to 150,000.

After the government, accountability rests with society. We need to recognise caste discrimination, its scale and intensity. We have no enemies-not the state nor society. We oppose the policies of the government and the social discrimination in traditional practices. But things are different now, there's an atmosphere of bitterness in society. Earlier in our campaign, when we demolished dry latrines, even the people inconvenienced by our protest were not hostile. They understood what we were doing and why. We could even discuss our differences over a cup of tea. But that seems to have changed.

What would be a truly spiritual experience is if the curse of manual scavenging were to go away, if dignified employment could be found for desperate families that must risk death every day to just stay alive. n

(As told to Sopan Joshi)

Bezwada Wilson is the national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan. He received the Magsaysay award in 2016