Death Pits Still
SafaiKarmachariAndolan is deeply pained and distressed at the continuing practice of manual scavenging in India.

Even though there is such rapid progress of infrastructure, science and technology in the country, many states are still using dry latrines and employing SafaiKarmachari women to clean the dry latrines.

There are dry latrines in 36 districts in the states of UP, MP, Bihar, Jharkhand, and J&K.

Just in the last five years, 419 SafaiKarmacharis have been reported as killed in sewer and septic tanks.

The GOI has claimed to spend thousands of crores of rupees to enhance the sanitation infrastructure and mechanisation of sewerage work. The GOI claims to have spent more than 55000 crores rupees to build more than 110 million toilets across the country in rural and urban areas. Then why are there still dry latrines and why are women still forced into manual scavenging and cleaning dry latrines in addition to cleaning open drains, railway tracks, open defecation and insanitary latrines?

The Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers (SRMS) has been replaced by the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE) from 2023-24 with a Rs 97.41 crore allocation. Around 3 4,800 Urban Local Bodies are to be covered to benefit about one lakh sewers and septic tank workers with the budgetary outlay of Rs 350 crore during the next three years up to 2025-26. Then why are people still getting killed in sewers and septic tanks even today. On 16th March 2025, three persons were forced to enter a manhole by the Delhi Jal Board in New Friends Colony, and one person was killed. The other two people are battling for their lives in the hospital.

The minister for social justice and empowerment and the GOI continue to be in denial of the continuing practice of manual scavenging, prevalence of dry latrines and sewerage deaths. The minister repeatedly reports to the parliament that there is no manual scavenging in the country. This is absolutely shameful.

The government is repeatedly and deliberately fudging data on sewerage workers' deaths. Why is the government making such false and misleading statements? How will we stop this atrocity of manual scavenging and deaths in sewer and septic tanks if the government that is responsible for protecting us is only interested in protecting the perpetrators of these caste atrocities?
Safai Karmachari Andolan

Stop Deportation
In a few days, 60 brave human rights defenders in Pakistan could be deported to Afghanistan, where they face prison, torture, or even death.

They have raised their voices for women’s rights, democracy, and freedom, and the Taliban want to silence them forever.

With a massive global outcry, people can push Pakistan to stop these high-risk deportations. The government has backed down before under international pressure, and together, people can make it happen again.

For decades, Pakistan has been a refuge for Afghans, but now deportations are escalating. The coming wave of expulsions will be devastating, especially for those who dared to fight for human rights. The UN has already documented hundreds of extrajudicial killings by the Taliban—sending these activists back is certainly a death sentence.

Massive raids are happening every day in Islamabad, and these activists are in hiding. Afghan arrests are taking place as one reads these lines, and deportations could happen within hours.
Miguel, Avaaz Team

Casteism in West Bengal
By now the whole country is fully aware how the administration and the Calcutta High Court have rightly forced two temples in West Bengal to allow Dalits, officially called Scheduled Caste (SC), to pray there, putting an end to centuries of discrimination, segregation, and humiliation.

While it was the police and the government that helped Dalits enter the Shiv temple in Burdwan district’s Gidhagram, a High Court judge played a stellar role in stamping out the caste apartheid in another Shiv temple in Nadia district’s Debogram.

Both cases caught a lot of Indians by surprise, essentially because West Bengal is widely perceived as a progressive and egalitarian state, which not only witnessed powerful reform movements against superstitions and caste inequalities stemming from the Brahminical order but had the good fortune of being ruled by communists for over three decades.

Naturally enough, the unprecedented and dramatic lifting of the bar on Dalits’ entry into the two temples received a lot of publicity in the print, electronic and social media. But the aftermath is not known to most people and merits immediate attention.

The upper caste living in 800-1000 brick-and-cement houses have stopped buying milk from Dalits and are shooing them away from their groceries, leaving them with no other option but to travel miles to buy food and other essentials of daily use. Moreover, upper caste-owned auto rickshaws are refusing to ferry low caste passengers to teach them a lesson for raising their head. Besides hurling casteist slurs and openly issuing threats of physical attacks, even priests who are supposed to embody all that’s good and saintly are bluntly refusing to assist Dalits in performing rituals before deities in the temple’s sanctum sanctorum.

Unlike Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, West Bengal appears to be free from the scourge of casteism for two main reasons. Firstly, the western-educated, left-liberal Bengali middle and upper class, called the Bhadrolok, or the social elite, has always denied the existence of casteism with a straight face. Jyoti Basu had famously said that caste simply did not exist in Bengal, which was divided into two classes – rich and poor. But the Shiv temple episode tells a different tale. Hidden casteism is no less obnoxious than what people see in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
MC

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 43, Apr 20 - 26, 2025