Globalisation and the safai karamchari

Yet, the fact remains that filth is our leitmotif. And as we hold sour noses and invent ingenious ways of shutting our eyes to the pervasive muck, the concerned citizen looks for the root cause. There is no aesthete more delicate in his or her sensibilities than the leading lights of INTACH. It is, therefore, in the nature of things that Almira Patel of INTACH has filed a petition in the Supreme Court praying in the larger public interest for a direction to the local bodies to clean up their solid waste. The principles that get established through this public interest litigation are likely to impinge upon all aspects of municipal responsibility.

The case came up before the Supreme Court in 1996 and, after a series of preliminary hearings, the honourable court decided in 1998 to constitute a committee headed by the Calcutta Municipal Commissioner. The report is ready and has been sent to state governments for their views. Once these are in, the court is expected to resume its hearings.

A major conclusion which the committee has arrived at is that efficient solid waste management requires functional privatisation. And to entice the private and NGO sectors into this task, two important pieces of legislation are recommended. One, amending the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. Two, amending the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970.

Meanwhile, the Chennai Corporation, under the chief minister’s son and political heir, Mayor M.K. Stalin, has shown the way to the privatised future. A Singapore-based company is being hired to do the job which Mayor Stalin was elected to do. Globalisation has thus come to the garbage dump. There is, however, a price to be paid. And the price will have to be paid by the municipal workers, the safai karamcharis. If you and I live in filth, surrounded by filth, the safai karamcharis live — and work — in even more filth, indeed, their entire lives are spent wallowing in filth. They are an army of unemployed immigrants, drifting from the most agriculturally deprived parts of the country to the teeming slums of our metropolis because, believe it or not, conditions in their villages are, unimaginably, worse even than the awful shanty-towns into which they pour. Moreover, 5,000 years of institutionalised social inequality has ensured that at the dawn of this 21st century almost all safaikaramcharis belong to particular segments of the Scheduled Caste community.

A tiny percentage of safai karamcharis manages, usually after decades of working with filth, to be absorbed as permanent safai karamcharis. It is a social cachet equivalent to you or I being invited to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the Independence Day reception. It is also, of course, a meal ticket to survival without corrosive fear. For fear is what rules the lives of temporary contract labour — fear of hunger, of course, but fear also of sickness and old age, fear for the family, fear, above all, of being arbitrarily and brutally thrown out of the encroachments in which they live. Permanent employment confers on the safai karamchari the right to stay undisturbed in the cesspool he has made his home.

It was to extend legal protection to the quest for ordinary human dignity that the 1989 Act was passed to prevent atrocities against the Scheduled Castes, including, of course, those who work in filth to clear the filth out of our lives. And it was in recognition of the fact that the temporary contract labourer is a sitting duck for economic exploitation that 30 long years ago legislation was enacted to regulate their conditions of employment pending the abolition of such exploitative employment.

Globalisation of garbage disposal has arrived but with the twin demand that the Atrocities Act be made inapplicable to global garbage disposal, and that exemption be provided to the global garbage contractor from the stringency of the Contract Labour Act. Should we succumb?

At one level, the patent failure of the municipalities to perform their most basic duty does indicate an ineluctable need to entrust the job to someone else — the NGO, private enterprise, the global expert. At another level, anyone with any exposure to the awful conditions in which the safai karamcharis live and work, must ask himself, if he is a true Indian, whether such globalisation should be at the expense of the worse off sections of our society. Has the committee recommended exception from the Atrocities Act because big money does not want to be troubled by small problems? Or because routinely recalcitrant safai karamcharis are in fact taking their supervisors to court by misrepresenting instructions to work as caste-provoked atrocities? In the ten years since the passage of this legislation, how many complaints have been lodged with the police and how many have led to convictions? The committee is silent on the evidence but eloquent on the solution urged by big business and upper-castecorporation officials.

As regards contract labour legislation, the 1970 Act provides for exemption in “specific emergencies for a specified period of time”. Mayor Stalin wishes to put Chennai in a permanent state of emergency so that the Singaporeans can get on with cleaning the city. And as regards atrocities against dalits, the approach seems to be that since atrocities have been the norm for five millennia, does a millennium more or less really matter?

I am certain global garbage companies will do a better job of cleaning our cities than any elected corporation and any number of safai karamcharis. I am equally certain we would be betraying the struggle for independence if all we want to do with independence is exempt the entrepreneur — NGO, foreign or domestic — from operating within the social compulsions of the law of the land. I trust the Supreme Court will bear this in mind before converting the recommendations of a committee of babus and busybodies into the judicial pronouncement of our ultimate authority on human, legal and constitutional rights.