Safai karamcharis at forefront in fight against coronavirus

QUOTE: “Covid-19 is a big challenge and sanitation workers are playing their role like doctors and soldiers. When the battle is won against the pandemic, we expect that hundreds of daily rated workers, whose regularisation is pending for years, get regular jobs,” Rinku Gill, president, Civic Safai Karamchari Union

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Sumit Hakhoo

Tribune News Service

Jammu, April 15

Discriminated against for decades due to the provisions of Article 370 and paid low wages, safai karamcharis of the Jammu Municipal Corporation have emerged as the frontline fighters to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Nearly 3,000 regular and daily rated workers are the backbone of the administration and are helping disinfect areas and ensuring that thesolid waste is lifted from the city’s residential colonies daily, especially from the red zones, where cases of the tcoronavirus have been detected.

There are only 800 permanent sanitation workers in the Jammu Municipal Corporation (JMC). More than 700 daily rated workers have been engaged by the corporation for the past several years on Rs 6,500 per month.

The rest of the sanitation workers are engaged through NGOs, which get a yearly contract from the corporation to maintain sanitation in the city. They are the most discriminated against and are paid lowly.

“Our services were never acknowledged. Despite our forefathers making Jammu and Kashmir their home in the 1950s, we were not enjoying citizenship rights when Article 370 was in place in the erstwhile J&K state. We hope that the new government will do justice with us and pay attention to our social and economic protection as the special status is now history,” said Peter Masih, a safai karamchari in the city.

The safai karamcharis were mostly brought from Punjab by the erstwhile state’s rulers with a promise to get them citizenship rights. Till the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019, they had been denied citizenship rights, thereby denying them regular jobs in the corporation.

“Covid-19 is a big challenge and sanitation workers are playing their role like doctors and soldiers. When the battle is won against the pandemic, we expect that hundreds of daily rated workers, whose regularisation is pending for years, get regular jobs,” said Rinku Gill, president, Civic Safai Karamchari Union.

Sanitation workers, who are paid less, live in abject poverty but have been doing their work during the lockdown while the rest of the populations sits safely inside their homes.