Two people have been arrested in Tamil Nadu’s Karur district in connection with the death of three construction workers. Rajesh, Sivakumar and Mohanraj died on Tuesday, November 15 while engaged in work at a septic tank at a construction site in Gandhi Nagar, Sukkaliyur. Gunasekaran, who is a lawyer and the owner of the house has been arrested along with the building contractor, Karur Superintendent of Police (SP) Sundaravathanam told TNM.
The SP also said that the men died from methane poisoning. “We are investigating if this is a manual scavenging death,” the SP said. In the FIR copy seen by TNM the case was registered under IPC sections 288 (negligent conduct with respect to pulling down or repairing buildings) and 304A.
According to the SP, section 5(1)(b) of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (PEMSR) Act is being added to the FIR. As Mohanraj, one of the three victims, is Dalit, the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act would also be added, he said. The other two men are from Backward Class (BC) communities. It is unclear as of now if the FIR has been altered to include the two Acts mentioned by the SP as TNM could not verify the claim.
The FIR was registered on the basis of a complaint filed by Cholarajan, the elder brother of Sivakumar. Cholarajan says that Sivakumar did construction work for a contractor called Karthik. On the day of his death, Sivakumar had gone to the construction site of lawyer Gunasekeran’s house. Cholarajan says in the FIR that he received a phone call from a man who worked with Sivakumar. The man told Cholanrajan that his brother had climbed down into a septic tank in the site to remove some material but fell unconscious. Mohanraj then went in to save Sivakumar and he too fell unconscious. Cholarajan says that at this point, he alerted Rajeshkumar, also known as Siva, a mason working in another construction site opposite to Gunasekaran’s under-construction building.
Rajeshkumar too entered the septic tank to help the other two men and fainted. According to Cholarajan, people in the vicinity who rushed to the spot to aid the men and the Karur Fire Department eventually managed to get Sivakumar, Mohanraj and Rajeshkumar out. When they were taken to the Karur Medical College and Hospital, the men were declared dead.
The FIR quoting Cholarajan says the houseowner Gunasekaran and the contractor Karthik did not give proper warning to Sivakumar, Mohanraj and Rajeshkumar and also failed to provide them with any protection gear.
The deaths in Karur happened within a month of another incident in which three men lost their lives while cleaning a septic tank in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur. The men, Ranganathan, Naveen Kumar and Thirumalai, died inside the septic tank of Sathyam Grand Resort, while attempting to clear blockages. They too succumbed to toxic fumes like the workers in Karur. According to Kathir, founder of Evidence, a human rights organisation based in Madurai, in the past ten months, 19 men have died in Tamil Nadu in nine separate incidents and in similar circumstances.
Tamil Nadu holds the grim status of topping the country in manual scavenging deaths in the last three years. Speaking to TNM, Samuel, the Tamil Nadu Coordinator of the Safai Karamchaari Andolan, says, “In 2018, we told the state government that there were over 30,000 people working as manual scavengers in just eight districts. We have been urging them to conduct an official survey in order to stop the practice and rehabilitate workers to new jobs,” he says.
A major issue is the government’s denial that manual scavenging exists. “We keep telling them it does and on the other side, the workers keep dying,” says Samuel.
Another systemic failure is not booking people under the PEMSR Act. “Either the officials themselves don’t seem to know that the FIR should be registered under the Act or they deliberately desist from doing so,” he alleges.
Samuel also expressed his disappointment over the issue persisting despite the many awareness campaigns. The incidents continue to happen irrespective of whether the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) or the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) is in power, he says.
“Neither society nor governments seem to want us to have a dignified life. At least after these deaths in Karur, the current state government should conduct a proper survey and rehabilitate people doing manual scavenging work into other jobs.”