This statement is based on a Seminar attended by representatives of Safai Karamchari Andolan, Republic Trade Union of India, Centre of Indian Trade Unions, Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front; Advocates, Doctors and Health Activists; Faculty and Students of MIDS, IIT-M, New College, ACJ, MSE, Madras University among others. The discussion was one among many incidents happening across the country to support the struggle for abolishing manual scavenging and rehabilitation of manual scavengers.
Others who would wish to endorse this statement may please use the link attached along with this post (from change.org) to sign it. http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/end-the-scourge-of-manual-scavenging-now.
More than a million people (mostly Dalit women and children) in India are still being ordained by the caste-ridden social order to clean the refuse of society with their bare hands. They are systemically forced to sell their labour-power, at a minimal price, to perform this inhuman task – what is termed as “Manual Scavenging”. People from particular Dalit communities, cutting across region and religion, are vulnerable to early death due to fatal infections, disease and exposure to toxic gases that manual scavenging entails. Further, age old casteism, continues to stigmatize and humiliate manual scavengers suppressing them to the status of “lesser humans”. Continue reading Petition – End the Scourge of Manual Scavenging




My childhood memories are so deeply intertwined with mango eating that it is difficult to separate the two. One reason for this is probably because the season of mangoes and the summer breaks in school coincided. We took our last exam and the schools closed their doors, to reopen after two and a half months. Educationists had not yet discovered Holiday Homework, the Summer Break torture, For parents and children and the summer vacations were an unmitigated joy. Those days we stayed at Aligarh, and every year we travelled to Delhi to spend time with our aunts and uncles, all cousins of our father.