The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has spent close to Rs 600 crore on advertising alone since 2014. However, there is never any money or political will to spend on mechanisation of sewage cleaning as worker
Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
Five men died while cleaning a sewer in a Delhi apartment complex last Sunday. The outcry that resulted was unusual. After all, the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis estimates that 612 people have died cleaning sewers since 1993 (although real numbers may actually be much higher), with one dying every five days since 2017. That's not counting those who die from illness and infection because of handling faeces and waste without protection.
The workers who died on Sunday were not sewage workers. They worked for a contractor who had been sub-contracted by JLL, a larger company responsible for maintaining the apartment block where they worked. Even after one person who entered the sewer did not come out and another who went after him fainted, their supervisor sent others in, who died.
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Of course, the larger firm has instated an inquiry. Of course, everyone will act shocked and stern as if they do not know that this kind of thing goes on. The web of sub-contracting is a kind-of clever practice of untouchability, where you work out 'efficient' and 'cost-effective' deals predicated on other people illegally exploiting workers. These workers risk their lives to clean the shit of nice people who live in nice houses with sparkling loos, just like in the ads. But, since you are sub-contracting the jobs, you are not really touching that exploitation, or confronting its real meaning. You can exist in wilful innocence, just like so many other people who inhabit a structure that breeds inequality, that is based on caste hierarchies, and then feel so noble, so good-hearted because they do not know their own caste and do not grossly enact casteist practices themselves.
And, of course, then the supervisor will be made an example of, but little will change. This happened in a private complex, but sewer deaths happen the same way in the government system as well because as long as sewer cleaning is not mechanised, which it can be, human beings will be doing that work.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has spent close to '600 crore on advertising alone since 2014, most of it on print, radio and television advertising. However, there is never any money or political will to spend on mechanisation of sewage cleaning as workers have been demanding for years. The campaign messaging, in a convenient sleight of hand, often represents the issue of toilets as primarily one to do with women, when, in fact, it has multiple meanings for different sections of society. It is a classic trope, where you are seen to be helping one group of underprivileged people while comfortably obscuring the reality of other groups of people affected by the same issue.
It has liberally displayed images of celebrities and politicians, including our prime minister, bearing pious expressions and long-handled brooms, as they clean streets that have about as much dirt as the legs of women in hair-removal commercials have hair: yaniki, none. How easy it is to keep clean, they seem to suggest, as they brush, brush, brush the truth under the carpet, which is often the point of publicity. I mean, come on yaar, are you now going to suggest Akshay Kumar should play a goofy, simple-hearted sewage cleaner in a movie? Nah, that innocence is only for people who are clean, because there are cleaners.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning, Mumbai-based film-maker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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