Greater Chennai Corporation to penalise supervisors if conservancy workers avoid using safety gear

Chennai's Greater Chennai Corporation plans to hold supervisors and officials accountable for workers not wearing safety gear.

With many conservancy workers not paying heed to the repeated instructions from higher officials to wear proper safety gear as per standards, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) is looking into holding the supervisors and officials in charge accountable.

“Safety gear is provided by the civic body and private contractors who handle waste management. Even after repeated instructions, some claim the gear is uncomfortable and avoid using it, which is unacceptable as this can negatively affect their health. Moreover, some use gloves made of cloth, which is worse as they absorb and retain effluents from the waste they collect or the drains they clean. Hence, the next level intervention would be to penalise supervisors or officials managing the workers if any neglect in the usage of safety gear protocol is observed,” said J. Radhakrishnan, GCC Commissioner.

According to a senior official in the civic body, the stock of gloves and boots was low as waste management had been outsourced, but Mr. Radhakrishnan had recently pointed out that the civic body should ensure that it had an adequate stock nevertheless.

Earlier in January on its official handle on X (formerly Twitter), the GCC had posted images of workers cleaning the silt catch pits in the city, in which they were allegedly cleaning the pits with bare hands.

In December 2023, a Division Bench of the Madras High Court comprising Justices S. Vaidyanathan and P.T. Asha expressed shock at human beings made to segregate waste, and that too with bare hands. Justice Asha, referring to the ban on manual scavenging, stated that the law would equally apply to waste segregation.