workers & their work

25-year-old Vikas, strips down and lowers himself into a sewer full of silt. Soon he is up to his chest in black muck. He fills a pail with the silt, which his co-workers pull out with the help of the rope attached to it, and empty it, before sending it back to him. The stench is overpowering, even for someone standing near.

Such injuries are not uncommon. "Often there are snakes inside if the manhole cover has been left open. The authorities don’t even pay for treatment, unless it is something major that requires hospitalisation," says Ratendra Singh, Vikas’s supervisor.

The Supreme Court has criminalised entering sewers without safety gear, even in emergency situations, and said that the work should be mechanised as far as possible.

But sewer workers say the order remains only on paper. "Many of us become alcoholics. It is difficult to do this in your senses. The stench stays even after we come out," says Mahendra, a worker in Faridabad.

50,000 TO ONE LAKH



is the approximate number of safai karamcharis in Delhi alone, says Manhar Valjibhai Zala, chairman of the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK). "We don’t know how many of these are sewer workers," he says, adding that the Commission is in the process of compiling a state-wise list of their number to get an all-India figure.

their family

Pooja didn’t know that her husband Brajesh was a sewer worker when she got married. Her own father had been a sanitation worker, but as far as she knows he didn’t clean sewers. He was also a permanent government employee, unlike Brajesh, who is a contract worker.

Ajay, whose brother Joginder is one of the 10 sewer workers who died in Delhi last month, says his children found out that he and his brothers had been sewer workers only after his brother died.

"I have a different reputation in society and I felt bad admitting that I do this work," says Ajay in a low voice. "You might call it sewer...for the kids it is a gutter, their father worked in the gutter." He and his three other siblings have stopped this work after Joginder’s death.

Pooja says she is worried about her husband’s safety when he enters the sewers, especially when she hears of workers dying inside manholes. But she is equally, if not more, worried about how their father’s profession will affect the children’s future.