Every September, hundreds of desperate men and women from Telangana’s dry Mahbubnagar district travel to Mumbai, work as sewage cleaners for eight months and head back home once the monsoon sets in. This June, at least two such sanitation workers won’t be making that return journey home.
On March 21, Santhula Mehboob, aged 30, and Kari Narsimha, aged 42, died of asphyxiation while trying to clean an underground sewage pipe in Mumbai’s northern suburb of Kandivli. The duo worked as contract labour for one of the many contractors that the city’s municipal corporation outsources sanitation and drainage work to.
Like hundreds of other sewer cleaners who die at work every year, Mehboob and Narsimha lost their lives because of the blatant but routine evasion of responsibility on the part of the municipal corporation, its ward officials and the contractors: the workers had no oxygen masks, gloves or other protective gear, no suction machines to check for poisonous gases in the pipes and no skilled supervisor to oversee the operation.
Ironically, their deaths have come at a time when safai karamcharis across the country are in the midst of a 125-day “Bhim Yatra” to highlight the apathy and discrimination that manual scavengers, sewer cleaners and other sanitation workers continue to face in India despite laws that protect their rights. The Bhim Yatra, a commemoration of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, began in Dibrugarh, Assam, on December 10 and completed 100 days on March 18. By the time it concludes in Delhi on April 13, it will have covered 30,000 km across 500 districts in all 30 states of the country.
The Safai Karamchari Andolan, which has organised the Yatra, has recorded 1,268 deaths of workers during sewer cleaning in just the past two years.
Two deaths
Around 2.30 pm on March 21, Kari Narsimha and four other sewage workers opened a manhole in Kandivli to clean a section of underground pipes that had not been maintained for a few months. By way of supervision, the team of contract workers had one mukadam (overseer) appointed by the contractor, but he was no more skilled than any of the other workers and earned just as much – Rs 150 or 200 a day.
“After opening the manhole, we first sent down a lit match to test if there was any gas down in the pipes,” said K Masanna, Narsimha’s friend and one of the contract workers in team. “There was no flare, so we waited for about half an hour and then Narsimha went down.”
Almost as soon as he reached the base, the team heard Narsimha fall. “Then Santhula Mehboob went down to see what had happened, and he too fainted and fell,” said Masanna. When the pair were eventually pulled out by the fire brigade, they were already dead. The mukadam, who had attempted to descend a few steps into the sewer to check on his colleagues, was also overcome by the toxic fumes, but he is now stable after two days of hospitalisation.
“We have no idea what happened down there and how there was so much deadly gas in the pipes even though the match we sent down didn’t cause a flare,” said Masanna.
Ill-equipped
At Kandivli’s Shatabdi hospital, where Narsimha and Mehboob’s bodies awaited post mortems on Tuesday evening, representatives of several labour unions attempted to explain why the deaths occurred.
When sewage pipes are not cleaned for a long time, they fill up with methane and other toxic gases in such strong concentrations that they can instantly kill people. “Ideally, a specialised machine should be sent down first to determine if there is enough oxygen in the pipe to send down a human,” said Durgesh Akkanapalli, a member of the Shramjivi Sangathan union for labour rights. “But that is rarely ever done.”
Another safety requirement is to wait for at least two hours after a manhole is opened before cleaners are sent down to pipes that are rarely maintained. “But workers often have to go down much sooner, because contractors simply send them back home if they protest too much,” said Akkanapalli.
Oxygen masks are almost never provided to sewer cleaners in Mumbai and other parts of India. The only masks given are simple cloth ones, which most workers choose to cast aside. “Cloth masks just filter the air a little bit – they can’t save people from poisonous gases and merely make it difficult for workers to talk to each other,” said Masanna.
The families
Narsimha and Mehboob are survived by their wives and three daughters each. On Tuesday evening, both the widows and the girls sat in a huddle on the lawns outside the hospital, wailing inconsolably in the arms of relatives streaming in from their villages in Telangana.
“These families come from backward castes and they literally have nothing to fall back on at home in Mahbubnagar,” said Samba Sivdu, another sanitation worker who comes from the same village as Mehboob and has known both him and Narsimha for a long time. “In the village, they are landless and work as farmhands on other people’s property. In Mumbai, they live in tarpaulin huts and are lucky to get contract work of this unorganised nature. What will become of their families now? Narsimha was able to send two of his daughters to school so far, but now they will have to drop out.”
According to Alamutthu Harijan, a member of the Kachra Vahtuk Shramik Sangh union for sanitation workers, the apathy of the authorities after the deaths has been appalling. “Not a single ward officer or representative of the civic body has come to visit the workers’ families so far,” said Harijan.
On Tuesday night, he said, a representative of Narayana Constructions, the company that had contracted the sewage cleaning work to the deceased labourers, showed up at the hospital to negotiate with union members, who were demanding a compensation package of Rs 25 lakh for each family. “They spoke very briefly with us and said they would give Rs 7.5 lakh to each widow in the form of fixed deposits. And then they left,” said Harijan, whose union is considering filing a case against the contractors and the civic body in the state’s labour court. “If we hadn’t made any demands, they would have paid barely Rs 20,000 to each family – I’ve seen this in the past.”
Despite several attempts, Scroll.in was unable to speak officials at the ward office in Kandivli or with representatives of the contractor.
“At the end of the day, no one really cares or takes responsibility for the lives of people like us who do this work,” said Sivdu. “We are just forgotten.”