Photo Essay: Including the Excluded – Part 4

Lens with a heart

Masking Pain

–By Sudharak Olwe*

Mukeshdevi didn’t reveal her surname because, “once people come to know that we are Valmikis, they treat us badly,” she says. She entered into this profession of cleaning toilets, dry latrines and open drains after marriage as her mother-in-law was too old to continue work. Mukeshdevi’s day starts at 7 am and ends at 2 pm. As a woman manual scavenger from Meerut’s Bhagwatpura, she attends to around 10 houses, either daily or on alternate days, depending upon the demand of work and earns up to Rs 2,000 per month.

Also see:Photo Essay: Including the Excluded – Part 3

Veiling her face and hair with her purple dupatta, 42-year-old Mukeshdevi enters the toilet, cleans it with bare hands, calls out to the owners of the house to release water so that the sewage flows into the open drain, exits the house and removes the accumulated sewage in the drain on the platform using a broom and a cycle mudguard. “Once this dries up, it is then picked up and disposed of,” she adds. This practice of toilets disposing sewage directly in open drains was observed throughout the city.

She walks us through a couple of houses where she works with her tools – broom and cycle mudguard – to scrape and clean the dirty open drains. Mukesh Devi began cleaning toilets, dry latrines and open drains after she got married, about 25 years ago, as her mother-in-law was too old to continue work.

With a visibly fragile mother-in-law, five kids and two grandchildren to take care of, Mukesh Devi and her husband Sukhraj somehow manage to make ends meet with their income of less than Rs 10,000 every month. The eldest son Arun usually works odd jobs, like his father, while the younger one, Anuj, does nothing. Her girls look after the household chores and their 85-year-old hearing-impaired grandmother Sumandevi.

A sense of gloom prevails in her relatively disoriented and unkempt semi-pucca house. Her children had to drop out of school when her husband fell sick five years ago.

“What other option do we have?” she quickly responded when asked why she was doing this menial job. “Even if we open a shop, no one would buy from us because we are Valmikis* The people we attend to (mostly the upper caste families) give us water in disposable glasses. We don’t reveal our surnames because once they come to know that we are Valmikis, they treat us badly,” she says with a piercing glare.

*Valmiki is a scheduled caste. People belonging to this caste were historically known as untouchables. It was quite evident that the community had no adequate knowledge about the government schemes designed for the rehabilitation of their own community. For instance, the manual scavengers were asked to leave their jobs and look for alternatives with one-time assistance of Rs 40,000 under the law: Prohibition of Employment of Manual Scavengers and Rehabilitation Act, 2013. Although, a survey was taken, and the number of scavengers were identified, not a single family we visited confirmed receiving such an amount. This led them to go back to their old profession.