Patna: Bihar has 5,296 manual scavengers, Maharashtra has 63,713, according to the provisional data of the recently released socio-economic and caste census.

Across India, over 1.8 lakh manual scavengers told the surveyors they manually remove untreated human excreta from dry toilets, railway tracks and sewers – a practice banned by Parliament 22 years ago. Interestingly, virtually every state government in India has been denying their existence.

According to newspaper reports, rural development ministry officials stated that most states had tried to press the Union ministry into putting zeroes in the column for manual scavengers, claiming the enumerators had recorded incorrect data.

“So, a verification procedure was introduced. Senior state officials went and verified the data. In some cases they corrected the data,” an official said.

Parliament had enacted the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrine (Prohibition) Act in 1993, banning manual scavenging of household toilets and requiring state governments to rehabilitate the scavengers.

The act stipulated a year’s jail and a fine of Rs 2,000 for anyone engaging manual scavengers or building dry (non-flush) toilets. But the states hardly ever enforced the law.

In 2013, Parliament passed the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, which widened the definition of manual scavenging to include the manual removal of excreta from sewers and railway tracks. It also increased the punishment to five years in jail.

In response to a public interest plea moved by the Safai Karmachari Andolan in 2003, almost every state government had told the Supreme Court that its population included no manual scavengers.

State government officials themselves verified the data, a senior Union rural development ministry official said.

But in its March 2014 judgment, the apex court accepted the sample data provided by the Andolan about manual scavengers who remove fresh faeces “with bare hands, brooms or metal scrapers”. It directed the states to rehabilitate them, as required by law.

Earlier, the population census of 2011 had recorded nearly eight lakh household dry toilets from where, it said, humans removed raw faeces manually. But it did not count the scavengers and was silent on manual scavenging of faeces from sewage lines and railway tracks.

Civic and rural bodies regularly hire scavengers to manually clean blocked sewers, as do the railways to clean the tracks of excreta dropped by train toilets.

“While we were providing data on individual scavengers, the states were issuing denials,” Andolan convener Bejwada Wilson said. “Now they can’t deny it any more.”

Wilson said his organisation, committed to “eradication of manual scavenging and rehabilitation of all scavengers”, would use the latest data to contact all the 1.8 lakh manual scavengers.

“We’ll take them to their district collectors, asking for their rehabilitation,” Wilson told a newspaper.

If the authorities do not act, the Andolan plans move the apex court again and launch a nationwide protest.

Wilson took issue with PM Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, saying some two lakh among the community toilets being set up under it would not have their septic tanks linked to sewage lines.

“Who will clean these tanks? Manual scavengers, of course. In a way, the government is perpetuating the problem of manual scavenging,” Wilson said.

He said every toilet in cities and villages should be connected to the sewerage system, and the railways and the local bodies must use machines to clean the sewers and tracks, as is done in developed countries.

  Bihar, India, scavenger, Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011