One person has died every five days while cleaning sewers and septic tanks
Since January 1, 2017, one person has died every five days, on an average, while cleaning sewers and septic tanks across the country, according to numbers collated by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), the statutory body that was set up by an Act of Parliament for the welfare of sanitation workers.
The data, which is based mostly on newspaper reports and numbers supplied by a few state governments, is the first such official attempt to account for the deaths of sewer and septic tank cleaners.
The more hazardous forms involving the often fatal task of entering toxic sewerage systems, mainly in urban areas, have not been documented officially. This, despite the fact that the 1993 law outlawing manual scavenging in India was amended in 2013 to include sewer and septic tank cleaning.
Of the 28 states and seven union territories, the NCSK data has reported deaths from only 13 states and UTs. SECC data doesn’t include urban India where sewer cleaning is more frequent. The state with the second highest number of manual scavenging in its villages — Madhya Pradesh at 23,105 as per SECC — doesn’t show any deaths in the NCSK data.
Indian Express