Sewer death victims’ kin cry for help

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 25

Rani cried inconsolably when asked how she discovered her partner Anil had died inside the drain he was sent to clean.

“He left the house to clean a gutter at 5 pm on September 14. When he didn’t return until 7 pm, I went looking for him. I had spoken to him around 6.30 pm and he said he was about to finish. Within that hour sometime he must have passed away. It was a moment I had feared all this while,” said Rani, one of the family members of sewer death victims who gathered at Jantar Mantar under the aegis of Safai Karamchari Andolan on Tuesday to seek justice and a life of dignity.

As the victims spoke of their travails, a backdrop of the Assembly presented a haunting picture; two huge panels bore names and pictures of young men, many of them from Delhi, Punjab and Haryana, whose lives were cut short. Four widows from Ludhiana spoke of how their husbands never received the farewell they deserved. Among these were Manga Devi whose husband died in 2007; Babli who lost her man in 2015; Veena whose husband was asphyxiated in 2014 and Mamata, who lost her husband last year.

All these men who died cleaning Indian cities made less than Rs 6,000 a month. All widows from Ludhiana said they got Rs 10 lakh compensation mandated by the Supreme Court in such cases. 

“But money is no compensation for a lost life. We are here to appeal to the government to stop people from dying in gutters. It should bring machines to clean sewers. No one deserves to die in a drain,” said Babli. 

Every family that lost their loved ones appealed to PM Narendra Modi to invest in machines for cleaning sewers and septic tanks as part of the Government’s “Clean India” campaign. SKA will now launch a nationwide movement for enhanced public investment in machines for cleaning gutters and sewers. Bezwada Wilson of SKA, who won Ramon Magsaysay Award for liberating lakhs of manual scavengers, said fight for justice has only begun.