
Manhole misery: A cry for a cleanup Premium
The Hindu
Fear, anxiety, poverty, and caste-based discrimination trap workers in a job with no safety measures, leading to deaths. Govt. must accept reality, provide safety gear, and ensure justice for victims' families. #EndManualScavenging
On March 22, 2018, a shroud of fear and anxiety enveloped M. Manikyala Rao as he wearily made his way home. He had just returned from a demonstration held in connection with the death of a co-worker who had entered the perilous depths of a manhole in Vambay colony, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. Rao, a contract employee with the Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC) had been working as a drain cleaner since 2015, and was aware of the horrors lurking beneath the manholes. But unlettered and trapped by circumstance, he continued to risk his life in a job he had no choice but to cling to.
Today, over five years later, his wife M. Yashoda, is getting into the habit of picking fully bloomed hibiscus flowers every morning, outside her two-room house in Nunna, near Vijayawada. She will string them together into a garland and place them across Rao’s photo, which hangs on a wall of the main room.
Rao died on July 15 this year, allegedly due to asphyxiation after entering a manhole in Badavapeta area. He was 44. He did not have on any protective gear.
“He called me just before beginning his work and said he was being forced to climb into a manhole to remove a block. An hour or so later, I got a call from his co-worker, Prasad, who said something had happened. I rushed to the government hospital where his co-workers had taken him,” Yashoda recalls.
Rao was one of the 43 people who have lost their lives in Andhra Pradesh from 2004 to date, as per data compiled by Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), an organisation working for the eradication of the dehumanising, caste-based practice. Of them, 21 families are yet to receive one or all of the three components — compensation, job, and house.
As per the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (PEMSR) Act, 2013, no person, local authority or any agency shall employ any person for hazardous cleaning of either a sewer or septic tank. Contravening the provisions will result in imprisonment for up to five years and a fine of up to ₹5 lakh, the Act says.
Further, the Act says that a survey needs to be undertaken when a “municipality has reason to believe that some persons are engaged or employed in manual scavenging”. It has clear provisions for rehabilitation, cash assistance, skill training, and alternate jobs for such people identified as manual scavengers.

“He travels fastest who travels alone”. M.V. Murthy has substantiated that thought from Rudyard Kipling. In 12 years, he has set 8,125 saplings in soil and seen them through to maturity. He has gone it alone — at multiple levels. No volunteers to work shoulder to shoulder with. No fundraising to support the purchase of native-tree saplings and tree guards. The only “volunteer” who tags along with Murthy on every tree-planting spree is his steadfastly loyal Honda Activa. The only source of funding is his wallet. At 5.30 a.m., when people are snoozing alarms, Pasumai Murthy (as he is popularly known) ranges around some Chennai neighbourhood, a plastic pot filled with water lodged in the wide floorboard of his step-through scooter After serving the saplings their “breakfast”, he gets his own, and around 9 a.m., the Activa is headed to his workplace, which lacks a fixed address. An assistant manager with Ramaniyam Builders, he is not desk-bound, his brief requiring him to visit construction sites. While strapping on the ratchet-type safety helmet, he puts on an invisible green cap. During the visits to those work sites, his mind maps spots where the Chennai sun stings the hardest, shadows being scarce. These are stark landscapes devoid of trees to offer respite from a glaring sun. In May 2013, at Vannanthurai junction, not far from his diggings in Vannanthurai in Adyar, the absence of something familiar made him acutely aware of it. A stand of trees had been removed on account of road expansion. A couple of children ran barefoot on baking tar. Elders leaned helplessly against sun-scorched compound walls. “That moment hit me,” he says. “If we can cut down trees in a day, why not grow them with equal urgency?” On August 15 that year, at Adyar Junction, he hoisted the national flag, distributed sweets, and planted 15 saplings. He was not doing anything radical, only following a rule that seldom budges from the paper it is printed on. For every tree that is felled on account of development, ten others need to be planted. People could process tree-planting exercises by groups, but not by a lone wolf. Sneers came his way; he smiled them off. He recalls being ridiculed by visitors to a Corporation gym while planting saplings at Besant Nagar beach. Now, he counts those same faces among his host of supporters, his consistent efforts to plant saplings and water them earning him their admiration. The admiration derives in part from the fact that he digs into his own pocket to keep this service going — well, growing. At a time, he buys a bundle of net-type material costing ₹1,700 out of which 25 tree guards can be made, on an average. For support to those tree guards, he buys 50 iron rods (thick and six feet long) which set him back by anywhere between ₹5000 and ₹6,000 depending on their weight. And he buys saplings from a nursery in Akkarai where he is assured of a discount by virtue of being a long-time buyer. Obviously, given the financial sacrifice all of this entails, he has got buy-in from his family to do this service. Being reasonable in the allocation of time has helped him win them over: the first half of every Sunday he reserves for tree-planting and the course of the second half is scripted by his wife Maria Priya and his daughter Meha M. He has received a doctorate degree from the The Academy of Universal Global Peace for this work.