Sanitised, so we don’t see them Premium

The sanitation workers of Dharmapuri district in Tamil Nadu speak out about how the administration treats them on a daily basis, and why an articulation of rights is seen as insubordination

A man is squatting over a clogged public toilet scooping out human faeces with a small mug and pouring it into a bucket. The stomach-churning video dated October 2022 was shot at the public toilet of Ambedkar colony for Adi Dravidars, under the Marandahalli town panchayat in Dharmapuri. The clip recorded by one of the sanitation workers to show proof of work as ‘before and after cleaning’, however, got leaked this January. The men in the video were the ‘old timers’— accustomed to this ‘job’, under the town panchayat administration.

But for Mariappan, in his 30s, the first time he scooped up human faeces, he vomited. “He still vomits,” said another woman, poking his arm and giggling. That was a little over two years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After his mother Palaniammal’s passing, Mariappan got his job on ‘compassionate grounds’, under the Tamil Nadu government’s ‘heir employment’ practice. Palaniammal was a sanitation worker of the town panchayat, cleaning latrines for the Marandahalli town panchayat for over 23 years.

Until 2018, even after the passage of Manual Scavenging laws in 2013, every Saturday, the town panchayat administration would gather its sanitation workers at the village grounds to clean the human faeces collected over the week from open defecation, in order to prepare the grounds for Sunday’s village market.

“Palaniammal would throw ash on the faeces for us to clean. We would spend the whole day sweeping it up, even when it rained” says Selvi (name changed to protect identity), remembering Mariappan’s mother. She is one among 24 women contractual workers appointed to self help groups (SHGs).

“The workers believed it was their job to clean human faeces,” says R. Selvam, joint secretary, Ooraga Valarchi Ullatchi Thurai Thozhilalargal Sangam, a labour union that is an affiliate of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). “It wasn’t easy to organise them, to make them believe it was a grave violation. We fought, forcing the town panchayat build a public toilet there,” he says.

However, as the video shows, cleaning faeces has only shifted from the village ground to the town panchayat toilets, invisibilising manual scavenging within the public toilet’s confines. On January 29, a day before Untouchability Eradication Day, the sanitation workers gathered at the Government Boys Higher Secondary School overlooking the town panchayat office. They had just come out of a meeting with the town panchayat clerk Sabhari, who had asked them to sign a declaration that they would not engage in manual scavenging.