For India's Untouchable Women, Cleaning Feces All in a Day's Work

Today is housecleaning day, not a task I particularly love. And then there's those bathroom chores: scrubbing the sink, tub, and the ubiquitous toilet.

But I have nothing to complain about compared to the women in India callled 'manual scavengers' who clean out public toilets. Public dry toilets. No water to flush the excrement.

These unfortunate women have only a broom and a tin plate to gather up human feces which they pile into baskets and carry on their heads for distances up to 2 miles. Often the contents drip into their hair, faces, and bodies.

It's worse than disgusting. The work puts them at risk for viral and bacterial infections of the skin, eyes, limbs, respiratory and gastrointestinal systems, not to mention tuberculosis.

Published yesterday, a Women's News Network article, "A Nation’s Lowest Women Work Under Severe Degradation," explains that although the work is illegal, many poor urban and rural parts of India still rely on manual scavengers:

“I remember the first time I had to carry a basketful on my head. I slipped and fell into the gutter. No one would come to pick me up because the basket was so dirty and I was covered with filth,” said manual scavenger Safai Karmachari Andolan.... “I sat there, howling, until another woman scavenger arrived....She hosed me down and took me home. But that day, I felt like the most unfortunate child in the whole world.”

Making up 98 percent of the majority of manual scavenging workers, these women, also known as “Valmikis,” come from the very lowest castes in India.

Loopholes in the law allow this to continue. The country's Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation had set a deadline of 2007 to end the practice of manual scavenging in India. But that date has come and gone and nothing has changed, as WNN reports:

Placed on the bottom of the list in India’s legislation, women manual scavengers are trapped by Indian society and caste discrimination, as they endlessly bound in cycles of poverty, inequality and lost opportunity....

Women working in the “night-soil” industry are often caught in an endless bind of indebtedness to the upper-caste neighbor households they serve. As they accept loans from employers for their “illegal” work, the women are trapped in an ongoing cycle of debt. These “impossible” loans, coming with a standard 10 percent finance charge, often leave the women workers in a state of perpetual obligation, servitude and bondage.

Unable to pay back any loan, with very little money, many women reach a point of great personal crisis. “Their poverty is so acute that, in desperation, some...resort to separating out non-digested wheat from buffalo dung.”...

Beyond India's borders, efforts are being made to increase awareness of the impossible situations these women face. The United Nations General Assembly will hear the life stories of two dozen manual scavengers the first week in July. It's part of the UN Human Rights Commission's ongoing attempts to pressure India to end this dangerous and desperate practice.