Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The evidence was unassailable: 227 sanitary workers employed by the Pune Municipal Corporation have died in the last 30 months. It needed an Express report to make the all-too-obvious connection between this unconscionably high mortality rate and a pathetic occupational safety regime and highlight the fact that being employed as a sanitary worker in Pune was like getting a ticket to hell. Following the frontpaged
Express report, Union Social Justice Minister Meira Kumar demanded some action of the Maharashtra chief minister. Get sanitation workers proper health insurance and protective gear, wrote the minister.
The fact is these workers, performing their thankless tasks in dank, dangerous conditions, are out of sight and out of mind, although every city worth the name would be crippled if they do not perform their appointed role. In many ways they emerge from the same caste/social hierarchies as that of the manual scavenger. By next year, the government promises that all manual scavengers some 5 to 8 lakh of them according to a PAC report are to be permanently rehabilitated. Even if this does happen, by some unlikely bureaucratic miracle, what about sanitation workers? Why haven8217;t they figured on the national radar? Why should they be doing these demeaning jobs? Surely such operations should be mechanised on a priority basis and the present staff trained to handle these machines?
