Building a Wider
Horizon With Labour
Over the past seven days, six people lost their lives in the national capital region while cleaning sewers after inhaling toxic gases, says the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), a statutory body set up by an Act of Parliament for the welfare of sanitation workers. Clearly, the law banning employment of human labour to clean sewage tanks is toothless. In theory, no person, local authority or agency can hire people for hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. The Employment of Manual Scavenging and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, was amended in 2013 to include a ban on employing or engaging people to clean sewer and septic tanks. But according to a reply by the central Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in the Lok Sabha in December last year, more than 300 people died due to asphyxiation while working in septic tanks in 2017 alone.
