Update: On June 15, seven men, including four sanitation workers have died in Gujarat and two workers died in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, while cleaning sewage.
This is 2019, and there seems to be no end to the deaths of young men because of manual scavenging. For government they may be just numbers but the families of the deceased are asking a simple question, when will this death trail end? In the latest incident that happened in Delhi, two more people died due to asphyxiation when they went inside a sewer at a Delhi restaurant.?
The victims, identified as Rakesh (45) and Ajay (19) died while two of their colleagues were admitted to a hospital.
"The incident occurred between 1:30 and 2 pm... Prima facie, it seems they went into the kitchen waste treatment plant for cleaning purposes," Monika Bhardwaj senior police official said. Rakesh and Ajay were declared brought dead at the hospitals while the other two are undergoing treatment.
In a statement, the Delhi Jal Board said, "It is a very tragic incident and we are very sad over it. However, DJB has nothing to do with it. Neither the said plant being cleaned is of DJB nor the workers belonged to DJB. They were hired privately by the owner."
BCCL
"The restaurant had been issued health licence after checking its compliance with DPCC norms for operation of effluent treatment plant. So, there is no violation on that part. The licence is valid till March 31," a senior civic official claimed.
The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act penalises people who employ manual scavengers. But the Act is rampantly flouted in India and there¡¯s hardly a check on people being employed as manual scavengers.
Despite ambitious targets to eradicate manual scavenging by 2019, there are hardly any concrete measures taken to remove this social evil.
BCCL
In January earlier this year, two men plunged to death while cleaning a septic tank near Coimbatore city, adding to the growing number of human deaths cause by the most demeaning work in India.
As per a report published in Newsclick in July 2018, there have been 1,340 deaths related to manual scavenging in the past 10 years across the country.?
According to numbers collated by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), since January 2017, one person has died every five days while cleaning sewers and septic tanks across the country.?