Paper short abstract:

The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, was enacted in 1993 with the expressed intent of liberating manual scavengers. Yet it remains entrenched. The paper shows how governmental power and social power collude to prevent the total eradication of manual scavenging. The problem is about social interaction, aspirations and legislations around it.

Paper long abstract:

The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, was enacted in 1993 with the expressed intent of liberating manual scavengers from a life of indignity and degradation. The practice of manual scavenging, a reprehensible practice of gathering human excreta from dry toilets with bare hands, brooms or metal scrapers, continues unabated, despite the initiatives taken under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, purported to become a ‘Jan Andolan’. This paper seeks to address the question of how and why manual scavenging as a form of social practice prevails, despite existence of laws which proscribe such practices. Such laws are caught between eradication and rehabilitation of manual scavengers. Building capabilities and empowering manual scavengers means taking cognizance of the social practices around the laws that silences voices of the oppressed. I would like to argue that even if one takes a top-down (laws, programs for amelioration of caste oppression) or bottom-up perspectives (desires for emancipation and material benefits) to the problem of caste and manual scavenging, it does not explain why manual scavenging persists. Evidence suggests that governmental power and social power colludes at vital intersecting social spheres of interaction, aspirations and laws to prevent the total eradication of manual scavenging. As much as this paper is about critiquing existing laws, it is also about focusing attention on the normative principles envisioned by the state and how in actual practice these principles are socially violated and made to stand apart from the injustices and hazards encountered by the marginalized in their everyday work lives. What can be done to ameliorate the condition of manual scavengers? Notwithstanding the contrasting theoretical positions vis-a vis manual scavenging by Gandhi and Ambedkar on the question of rehabilitation of manual scavengers, one has to be wary of taking a one-dimensional view of caste, namely its structural violence in which manual scavengers are treated as expendables and where it is the sovereign prerogative of caste to create that exceptionalism for its perpetuation. One needs to reiterate that structural violence around ritual rank and steps towards rehabilitation or eradication is contingent upon another narrative which deals with the fact of exploitation of lower castes that are at once ritual and material in nature, which is, lack of land ownership, indignity of manual work in general, lack of access to education, health and resources in rural and urban areas and no symbolic capital. The atrocities on Dalits and the fact that they have been cast aside and meant to do menial jobs has to be seen alongside the lack of access to resources thematic. Both these narrative processes are not apart but intertwined and each affects the outcomes of the other. The fate of manual scavengers hangs in balance particularly in times of distress and calamities. Furthermore, heightened vulnerabilities of labourers in other menial jobs forces them to shift occupation and enter the manual scavenging profession in urban areas which ensure partial security of pay in contractual employment within a semi-governmental arrangement. One must frontally acknowledge that caste practices and identities are materially based on exploitation and structural violence. This structural violence is most visible in the way untouchables are treated. While formally caste is not the language of bureaucracy, caste considerations implicitly inform or form the actual negotiations between state bureaucracies and the communities when it comes to redistribution of land, practice in schools, recruitment for government jobs. Emphasizing governmentality and historical negotiations between the bureaucracies and the dominant or landed caste should not lose sight of the structural violence inflicted upon the landless castes belonging to Dalit groups who are principally involved in manual scavenging. It is their manual labour that continues to sustain the governmental power. In this backdrop a comprehensive rehabilitation process can be worked out in which all the persons who are engaged in this practice should come under a legal regulatory framework based on principles of equity, human dignity and self-respect. This ethical dimension too has to be applied with caution. The apprehension is that a compassionate legal application, might take away the powers that the community derives from using the law on their own terms. Any policy exercise which will allow manual scavenging to exist in perpetuity must be curbed using activism, socialization and societal sensitization in the public sphere.