Sunil Yadav
Mphil. Student TISS
You have become too big for your boots now’ said the builder to me. This was probably the first time in my life that I came to face the harsh realities of the caste system. The builder was reacting to my aggressive demands for a welfare centre and a temple during the redevelopment of our building in Mumbai in 2002. The builder referred to my growing assertiveness reminding me of my caste status as a Dalit. This was a particularly trying time in my life. My father, a Safai Karmachari was suffering from paralysis and I was forced to pick up odd jobs at an office and a wine shop. I along with my mother was the breadwinner in my family. My mother picked up jobs as an ‘ayah’ to help the family.
I decided to forge bonds within the local community, with a view that my situation can only be bettered by aligning my interests with the community. I carried on this spirit for the next few years of my life, all the while struggling to make ends meet at home through a variety of odd jobs such as manning a STD booth and a pest control worker. The only hope of betterment at this stage of my life was the hope that I would be offered my father’s job as a Safai Karmachari on compassionate grounds. Compared to the struggles and low wages I had with the jobs in the informal sector, the work of a Safai Karmachari appeared attractive to me. Three generations of my family including me have worked as Safai Karmacharis. I have never seen both my grandparents, my grandfather is said to have passed away at an age between 45 to 50 years. My grandmother they say passed away because of someone casting a spell of black magic on her. My father himself a Safai Karmachari, loading urban waste in to the Municipality truck, all of this clearing of waste and loading the waste was through the using of hands. Unsurprisingly my father was an alcoholic and also a drug addict, I believe that I really cannot blame him for the habit as it is still quite common among the Safai Karmacharis to indulge in forms of alcoholism and drug abuse to somehow deaden their own senses before starting on this line of inhuman work.
The idea of manual scavenging may appear foreign to most middle class Indians, however anyone who has travelled by trains for a relatively longer distance would not fail to realise that the tracks at the stations would be littered with human excreta of commuters. For commuters who use the station and often cover their faces due to the stench, it would not involve a lot of imagination to begin to understand the nature of this work. A person is engaged officially to physically remove/extricate human excreta from the railway tracks. The most important point here is that such manual scavengers are mostly from the Dalit community across the country. In the age where there is much written about upward mobility of the population, it does sound a paradox that people from a certain community are forced in to this profession, for the lack of a better choice. This is not a job that is temporary or part time in nature as well, workers end up spending the entire duration of their careers (upwards of 20 years) in this line of work. It is then not a surprising fact that the life expectancy of such workers is also uncommonly lower in comparison given the prevalence of substance abuse. This is probably one of the few jobs where the idea of reservation against castes simply does not arise.
My personal situation was not unlike the situations of the thousands engaged in this line of work. I was actually looking forward to landing the job of a Safai Karmachari at this point in my life. The wages as a Safai Karmachari for the Municipality and the promise of a permanent job looked alluring to me. There was hardly any other choice left for me in my life, I was a X standard failure, and had been working ever since the age of 16 years. It was not only me but my friends in the community who were in the same situation, so the idea that there was something wrong in such a system never occurred to my naive mind. At this time in my life, I led a life of fun and amusement with my group of friends in the locality. I had also harboured hopes of a political career as a leader at this point of my life. I soon realised my naiveté after having seen first-hand the need for financial strength or political lineage or the support from gangsters.
However, there was considerable pressure from friends and family to start earning money at this age. I worked as a courier for a stock broker, lugging around sacks of paper stocks weighing up to 100 to 150 kilos across the country. I continued this line of work for two years alongside other odd jobs such as a private security guard at a private residence. I struggled to complete my X standard during this period, with no success. There was little or no hope in my life except for the job of a Safai Karmachari. The promise of a job with permanency grew bigger in my hopes for a better future.
In 2005, I finally managed to land a job in Municipality as a Safai Karmachari, however on probation for three years. The monthly pay was based on the ‘Hyderabad pattern’ at the rate of 3900/-. Soon I realised that the level of exploitation in this job by senior workers, the mukkadams and the Junior Officer was just as bad or worse. I was expected to pick up the most demeaning of tasks such as overworking me by assigning others work of sweeping the streets, cleaning up in the house gullies. The first day when I reported to work, I worked to clear the waste in the house gully continuously from 7 am to 12-30 pm. This was the first time in my life that I was forced to engage with this line of work. The first thing I did after reaching home was to scrub my body vigorously, but even after this treatment the stench from my hands never left my body. The sheer amount of physical labour that was needed for this work meant I slept for a straight 16 hours and just woke in time for the next day’s work. I was scared for the first time in my life; I just could not imagine myself doing this work for the rest of my life like my forefathers.
During this probation period, I have worked in knee deep sludge in the house gullies, when people throw the waste directly from the windows on to my body. I have had tea, sanitary napkins, food leftovers being thrown on me while working. The stench never left my body, I rubbed raw coriander over my hands after finishing work to try and ward off this stench. I used to get free coriander in the market, while cleaning up the market area otherwise I had to buy coriander. There was always the fear of open manholes during the monsoons.
I joined up the Municipal Mazdoor Union, and I learnt the value of struggle against forms of oppression. Soon I started to struggle against this unequal and unfair distribution of work with my senior workers. Over a period of time, gradually I was accepted in to their group and I grew into this line of work. The one promise I made to myself was not to fall in to the regular habit of drinking, I never got drunk or intoxicated before and during work. Somehow I always harboured hopes of a different and better future for myself.
The only way out for me out of this situation was to try and gain an education for myself. I enrolled in to B.Com at the Yashwantrao Chavan Open University. During the examinations, I used to come in early for work at 5-30 am, finish my work and appear for the examination at 11-00 am.
The most devastating event in my life was the dowry death of my sister. She was burned to death by her husband and the in-laws. She struggled between life and death for 6 days in the hospital, and there was a lot of opposition within my family to file a case against the perpetrators. My sister had three children from the ages of 8 months to 2 years. However my rage against this crime had by then allowed me no other course of action but to pursue legal action against my sister’s in-laws family. I faced quite a lot of problems in filing the FIR, due to the manipulations of the accused. I was very attached to my sister’s children, and I was frustrated and angered by the fact that my own financial situation and station in life did not even allow me to harbour hopes of taking them under my family’s fold.
I was fighting a battle on many fronts at this stage in my life, with my own continuing education, problems at work, my own recent marriage, financial insecurity and my sister’s murder.
Soon in the year 2007, I became a permanent employee in the Municipality as a Safai Karmachari. This was followed by the happiness for me in form of the birth of my daughter. My father finally succumbed to his illness in the same period. The cold arithmetic of this situation for me meant the end of one responsibility and the beginning of another responsibility. In the year 2008, I completed my Bachelors of Commerce. I have always been inspired by Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statement to educate, organise and agitate. Through the completion of this degree, I believe I had become aware and more importantly conscious of the system that forced me in to a particular station in life, I was better prepared for the battles ahead.
I started giving serious thought to pursue Social work at Nirmala Niketan in Mumbai. I enrolled in to the diploma course at the same institute. I was unable to grasp all the concepts associated with the diploma course due to my weakness in the English language, however I understood the value of good field action. I found out at the same time, that a Masters degree in social work can be completed in the Marathi medium, at Tilak Maharashtra university, Pune. I enrolled in to the course for social work and also a Bachelors degree in Journalism at Yashwantrao Chavan Open University.
However on work front, I was still doing the same job of a Safai Karmachari. I completed all of these courses while working as a Safai Karmachari, and this situation remained the same irrespective of my educational attainments. My social circle and network had expanded due to my education and there were a lot of exchanges of ideas and information. I found out about the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) through my class mates.
I also found out about a specific course in TISS, Globalisation and Labour. Initially I was discouraged by the talk of the reputation and the academic standards of the institute. I however kept trying to find out more and mustered courage to meet the Dean of the centre for labour studies about a possible admission. Prof.Bhowmik, the dean was helpful and he encouraged me to apply for the course the next year. The course was open to trade unionists and I had been an active trade unionist for the past 6 years.
I finally gained admission to the course – Masters of Arts – Globalisation and Labour in the year 2012. This was the first full time course I had enrolled into. I then carefully looked up the service rules of the Municipality for the provisions of study leave. I applied for study leave to the Municipality immediately after gaining admission to the course. The Municipality had earlier given me permission to appear for the interview for the course. However on the issue of study leave, the municipality remained silent, without either accepting or rejecting my study leave.
I managed to get my work shifted to the night shift at the beginning of the course. During the start of the course, the idea of studying full time was alien to me and I struggled with the classes and attendance in the course. However, I was ably supported by my class mates in my struggles in the course.
My request for study leave was kept pending at the municipality. On further queries, I was made to run from pillar to post for a definite answer on the request. I have waited for 5 to 6 hours at a stretch until the late hours of the night for an audience with the Additional municipal commissioner. I was never given a definite answer. Slowly I realised that here was an issue with more at stake than the simple granting of study leave. I must have been one of the first, if not the first Safai Karmachari at the Municipality to have asked for a full time study leave at an institute of national repute. I was repeatedly asked by the administration to avail my accumulated leave of around 200 odd days and complete my studies through this. However, things on the academic end were looking promising and I did quite well in my first semester examinations and was also offered an exchange program opportunity in South Africa in the year 2013.
This issue is much bigger than just the case of study leave for a single Safai Karmachari. There are thousands of workers engaged in work of menial nature who have no hope of escaping the drudgery of this life throughout their working careers. It is this system of maintaining a permanent class of workers who have no hope of betterment in their careers that allows the smooth functioning of the organisational machinery of the Municipality. Granting study leave to one such worker would set a ‘dangerous’ precedent, and allow mobility for this toiling class. So it is in this context that I understood my struggle for a simple case of study leave.
My struggle for study leave has been a long and hard journey and continues to be so till date. I have petitioned numerous government departments/officials at the state and the centre. The national commission for Safai Karmacharis even wrote to the commissioner of the municipality thrice without a single response. A classmate of mine through a RTI application asked for the definition of an employee and if a Safai Karmachari qualifies as being an employee. The response from the municipality was eloquent in its brevity ‘A Safai Karmachari is an employee, but is not eligible for study leave’.
My struggles with the administration were reported in the Indian express. I recently contacted the National commission for scheduled castes, and the commission summoned the commissioner and the additional commissioner responsible for Personnel for an official hearing this week. The municipality has now been directed to approve the study leave or face action under the prevention of atrocities act. I do not consider this as the end of my struggles but only one in the many struggles to follow.
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