Climbing out of the hellhole

When Pammi Sanswal speaks, her jhumka s swing with equal vigour. The eldest of eight siblings, the 27-year-old has seen the harsh realities of life up-close. Belonging to the Valmiki caste, and from a small town called Shahabad Markanda in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, she remembers waking up early in the morning to the clatter in the kitchen as her mother, Kamlesh, hurriedly whipped up a meal for the family. Then, with a wicker basket on her head, Kamlesh left for her daily work -- to go to the homes of the rich and scrape clean their shit.

“My mother is a manual scavenger. Even now,” Pammi says.

While manual scavenging was banned by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, it took another two years for the dry latrines in Pammi’s town to be converted to proper toilets. But life has not changed much for 41-year-old Kamlesh. She still cleans the toilets in the houses where she, until a few years ago, picked up human excreta. She sweeps and mops the floors, too, but washing or touching utensils, even accidentally, is strictly prohibited.

Being the eldest, it quickly became Pammi’s responsibility to take care of her younger siblings as her parents went to work. Her father, 49-year-old Ram Jowari, juggles multiple jobs. On some days, he cleans the open drains, on others he sweeps the streets. Sometimes he is a day labourer at a construction site. Income was always meagre and the mouths to feed, many. Jobs were not something the family chose. Pammi learnt to be grateful for work, no matter how menial it was.

A chance meeting with Magsaysay Award winner Bezwada Wilson, national convener of the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), when he visited her hometown with his team changed everything. It gave her the hope that she could escape her fate. Wilson was a role model she could identify with. “ Unke andar lagan hai (he has the drive). He belongs to a family like mine. He ran away from home in his youth and spent his life fighting to free people like us. I want to fight for the same cause,” she says.

Pammi is now pursuing her master’s degree in social work from Kurukshetra University. Nobody in her family has studied this far. “I am preparing for the IAS exams. People like me need to get up there, in important positions, so that we can speak for ourselves,” she says.

“No child of a manual scavenger wants to follow in the footsteps of their parents,” says Dr Renu Chhachhar, core team member and coordinator at the SKA. “It isn’t common anymore for parents to take their children along when they go to work. Parents do whatever it takes to not pass their occupation down to their children,” adds Chhachhar.

Fighters: Pammi (far right) with her mother and sisters at a protest in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar

On September 25, Pammi, her sisters and mother boarded a morning bus and travelled 200 km to the Capital’s Jantar Mantar to take part in Wilson’s “Stop Killing Us” rally. It was organised to condemn the death of 11 sewerage workers, six of them in the Capital, over the course of a week in September. When Wilson shouted into the microphone, “ Sewer ki hathya bandh karo! Bandh karo! Bandh karo ! (Stop murders in the sewer!)” and the crowds chanted after him, the moment felt like a live wire. Sitting among the hundreds who had poured in from towns and villages in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, listening to the sordid realities of a manual scavenger’s life, it was the resolve of young people such as Pammi to break free that found more resonance.

Guts and dreams

The going, however, has not been easy. Her own battles with discrimination still hurt. She was in Standard VI at Khalsa School for Girls in her town when she went for the selection for the school hockey team. “They wanted to know where I lived. The neighbourhood indicated my parents’ occupation and I was told to go back and not show my face again,” she remembers. At school, she was made to sit on the last bench while the so-called upper castes sat in front. She was always marked the lowest, even when she wrote all the right answers. Not one to lose heart, she scored 75 per cent in her Standard XII board exams.

The sahibs whose dry latrine Kamlesh cleaned would inquire about Pammi’s plans. When she shared her dreams of pursuing a master’s degree and prepare for the IAS, she was immediately shown her place. She remembers being told, “It’s your job to clean. Do that. Even as a sweeper you will earn well. What will you do becoming an IAS officer?”

Pammi keeps a stock retort for such people. “I tell them: It’s been 70 years since we became independent, but your mind is still caged! You tell people proudly that you’ve put your discriminating ways behind, but in your heart, you haven’t changed,” she says.

Her two sisters Kajal and Pallavi, who study at the DAV school in Shahabad Markanda, have taken to sports. Seventeen-year-old Kajal is a hockey player and her team won the Kurukshetra district-level inter-school match in 2015. “Some months ago, I was beaten up with hockey sticks and asked not to play by some members of the team. But I persisted,” she says. Pallavi, 14, is an athlete. A government school coach trains her for free after school. Last year, Pallavi came first in a district-level inter-school race. She wants to compete at the state-level. Both sports require coaching and regular funding, neither of which the parents can provide. Pammi is willing to work on the side to fulfil her and her sisters’ dreams.

“I want to free manual scavengers. The parents should motivate their children to dream big. Going into this line should not even be an option for children like us,” says Pammi.

Reality check

The dreams are shared by their parents, who know that if there is one thing they don’t want, it is to have their child follow in their footsteps.

Buddharam fights two recurring nightmares — of losing his footing inside a 22ft manhole, and of his children falling behind at school. He lives with his wife, a sweeper at a private school, and their two children in Punjab’s Fategarh Sahib district. In 1996, he worked in a steel factory. But when his father fell ill and Buddharam took a few days off, he found he had no job to return to. His boss had been waiting for an excuse to fire him because he was from the Valmiki caste, he says. “I was pushed back into something I had nearly escaped. After a while I stopped trying. Instead, I dream for my children,” Buddharam, 42, says.

Eyes full of dreams: Babita, a manual scavenger, poses with her child at her home in Bharatpur

While his 20-year-old elder son is a degree student of agriculture at Patiala’s government college, the younger one is in Std II. “ Kheech ke le gaye apney bachchon ko (We pulled our children up). It was the most difficult thing I did,” he says, his eyes lighting up, recalling how he borrowed money from the extended family to fund his older son’s education. “I try to stay away from my son’s school so that his teachers don’t associate them with me. I send my wife instead. My son needs to become his own person. My shadow shouldn’t obstruct his path,” says Buddharam.

Last year, the state government granted him a rehabilitation package of ₹40,000. He invested a part of it in his children’s education, and the rest on a small shop and cart to sell bread omelette in the evenings. However, that hasn’t stopped him from cleaning sewers, which fetches him ₹400-500 per job. “Every penny I earn is to ensure that my children never slip below the poverty line,” he says.

Buddharam had come to Jantar Mantar from Fategarh Sahib along with 90 others like him. Apart from rehabilitation, they are also demanding jobs for their children.

Lata says her eight-year-old son gets angry whenever anyone asks him if he wants to grow up and be like his parents. “He thinks it’s an abuse. He has big-big dreams. He wants to be a doctor or a police officer. He is repulsed by the dirty work we do,” says Lata, eyeing her son, who shuffles embarrassedly. They had come to Jantar Mantar from Manglaur village in Uttarakhand’s Roorkee district. Lata’s husband cleans sewers, while she is a sweeper.

A few rows away, Rani weeps, hunched over a framed picture of her husband, while her three children hover around her. Rani’s husband, Anil, died while cleaning a septic tank in West Delhi’s Dabri on September 14. He choked to death with nobody to pull him out. He was 28. “All I want is for the government to ensure my children get access to good education. It is what my husband wanted. Sewer lines should be operated only by machines, not people,” Rani tells BL ink. While Anil wasn’t the children’s biological father, he had big dreams for them, she says.

Her 11-year-old son, Gaurav, wants to be a police officer. “And seven-year-old Lakshmi is always playing doctor-doctor,” Rani adds.

In a recent letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the SKA pointed out that 221 people had died in sewers and septic tanks since 2017, with 83 deaths reported in the last few months. In June this year, an inter-ministerial task force put the number of people engaged in manual scavenging in India at 53,236, a four-fold rise from the 13,000-odd until 2017. The data, though, covers only 121 of the 600-odd districts. Unreported deaths are estimated to be far higher.

“People doing manual scavenging in the villages are trapped,” Wilson says. “To break away from their caste identities their children need to move to cities and find jobs.” A generation growing up determined to fight its fate needs support. “The young from the community are angry because society is yet to create occupations for them that are not brandished as acts of ‘charity’. They don’t want charity. They want jobs on merit. They want to fight for opportunities. They are willing to put their lives on it because they have nothing to lose. That’s something to pin our hopes on,” he says.

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