India’s Railways formally employs Dalits in illegal manual scavenging work

Evidence

While janitors’ jobs in malls and in corporate offices with swanky toilets that do not involve ‘manual scavenging’ go to non-Dalits, there are (officially) 1.3 million people, mostly women, who continue to earn their living by carrying baskets of human shit on their heads as they clean out traditional-style toilets that use no water. Though it is against the law, the Indian Railways is one of the biggest employers of manual scavengers. Its 14,300 trains transport twenty-five million passengers across 65,000 kilometres every day. Their shit is funnelled straight onto the railway tracks through 172,000 open-discharge toilets. This shit, which must amount to several tonnes a day, is cleaned by hand, without gloves or any protective equipment, exclusively by Dalits. While the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, was cleared by the Cabinet and by the Rajya Sabha in September 2013, the Indian Railways has ignored it. With deepening poverty and the steady evaporation of government jobs, a section of Dalits has to fiercely guard its ‘permanent’ state employment as hereditary shit-cleaners against predatory interlopers. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the chapter’s opening claim about caste as ongoing material infrastructure — connects to Ambedkar’s argument that caste is an economic/civic reality, not just a prejudice.