After two migrant workers from Bihar were spotted cleaning sewage by their hands from a drain at Infantry Road in Bengaluru, a police complaint has been filed against the firm Amrutha Constructions Private Ltd, which allegedly put the duo on the task. The two unidentified workers are part of the Smart City project. The complaint was filed on Friday, September 9, by Vinay Sreenivasa, who works with the Alternative Law Forum (ALF).

Vinay, who had filed a complaint against the same company last year as well, saw the workers removing sewage water from the drain around 11.45 am on Friday. “I was on my way to work when I saw two people emptying a kind of black liquid onto the road. It was clearly sewage, and had a nauseating smell. When I approached them to ask what they were doing, they said they were repairing a blockage and putting in a new pipe,” he says.

Since the workers did not speak Kannada and he had trouble understanding their Hindi, he wasn’t able to communicate much with the workers, Vinay says. “The people in the building next to which the work was happening said the sewage had been blocked for a few days. Then I figured out that these workers belonged to the Smart City project. I called the Commercial Street Police Station and informed them of the matter. The police officials then visited the area where the Smart City workers stay and found the workers’ supervisors,” he explains.

The supervisors, however, had argued that they had only asked the workers to repair a broken water pipe. “But if they were only asked to repair a broken water pipe, why were they emptying out sewage for no reason,” Vinay asks. As he points out, it is evident from photographs that a sewage pipe was broken at the spot in which they were working. “Why will anybody who was only asked to repair a water pipe start cleaning out sewage by hand?” Making someone touch raw sewage by hand is a clear violation of Section 7 of the Manual Scavenging Act, says Vinay, adding that it was also a violation of the Karnataka High Court order in the AICCTU vs Union of India case.

One of the workers in question says that they have no option but to do this work when their employer asks them to. “We do not want to do this dirty work of removing sewage water. Who knows what sickness we will get because of this. But what can we do? We are desperate,” he says, adding that the people in his village did not even know that he was doing such work here. “We will lose our dignity if they see us like this,” he says.

The second worker points out that the employers do not even give them gloves while assigning them this work. “We are made to do this work only sometimes, but not regularly. But they don’t even give us gloves. Workers who are pulling weeds on the other side are given gloves, but we are not,” he adds.

A similar incident had taken place last year as well, when the Smart City-affiliated contractors sent a worker down a manhole, says Vinay. “A complaint was filed then as well, but the Smart City authorities responded by saying that it was not sewage, but rainwater. After this, we had to explain to them the concept of manual scavenging, which is something that they should know about as a public agency. It is distressing to see that they still don’t seem to care. The same actions are being repeated and the same engineers are involved,” he says.