Cleaning latrines by hand: 'How can a person do that?'

When he fully realized what exactly his parents and older brother did for a living, and what it likely meant for his own future, Bezwada Wilson said he was so angry that he considered suicide.

His relatives, and his wider community, were manual scavengers, tasked with manually clearing human feces from dry latrines in a government-run gold mine in southern India.

While his parents had done their utmost to hide the nature of their work from their youngest child for as long as possible (telling Mr. Bezwada they were sweepers), as a student Mr. Bezwada knew that his classmates viewed him with cruel condescension . He just didn't know the reason.

“Growing up, I got the feeling that I was different from everyone else at school. I was not allowed to laugh at jokes and caste insults were thrown at me,” Mr. Bezwada said in a recent evening interview in Delhi. “All I wanted to know then was why my community was different, and how could I make them equal to the others?”

By the time he was about 18, the young man of course knew what his community was doing to put food on the table, but his knowledge was still only theoretical. He wanted to experience the work himself.

So he urged some manual scavengers to take him with them to work. He watched them reach deep into a well to scrape dried human waste from the toilet floor, pile it into iron buckets, and then load it into a cart to dump it on the outskirts of the mining town.

As he was observing, a man's bucket fell into the well. The man rolled up his pants before falling into the ankle-deep hole to pull out the bucket.

“I screamed, cried and begged him not to do this. How can a person do that?” Mr Bezwada remembered that.

The night of that incident, enraged by what he had seen, he sat by a water tank for hours and contemplated jumping in to end his life.

“The sound of the water was consistent. But what I could hear in my head was a 'no, don't die'. Live on and fight,'” Mr. Bezwada recalled.

And he has done just that for the past four decades.

Every morning, Mr. Bezwada, now 57, wakes up with a single-minded mission: to rid his community of the age-old plague associated with their caste.

“My community did not realize that this is not what they were born to do,” Mr. Bezwada said, “but that this is what they were made to do by society and government.”

The movement he founded in 1993 Safai Karmachari Andolanor Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers, is now one of the largest organizations in India fighting against caste discrimination.

Although such discrimination is illegal in India, almost all of the country's sanitation workers who deal with human waste, including those who clean septic tanks and sewers, are among the lowest caste in their communities.

In addition to the social stigma, such work can be extremely dangerous: in confined spaces, human waste can create a mix of toxic gases, which can result in loss of consciousness and death for those forced to breathe the polluted air for extended periods.

Mr Bezwada's Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers movement has recorded more than 1,300 deaths among sanitation workers since the early 1990s.

After his own near-death experience at the water tank, Mr. Bezwada continued to talk to community members at the Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka state, where 114 dry latrine cleaners and about 1,000 sanitation workers were among the roughly 90,000 employees in total.

He discovered that manual scavenging was not a local problem, but an India-wide problem. So he started writing letters, including to the Chief Minister of Karnataka and to the Prime Minister of India. Through a friend, he obtained a camera and began documenting the situation in the mine, which closed in 2001.

Communists were active in the camp and regularly organized demonstrations for higher wages, and Mr. Bezwada said he learned how to protest from them.

There were many days when he was the only one protesting, and his mother urged him to end his activism. “'Never mind. We're moving,'” he told him.

His break came when a journalist contacted him for a story about the continued existence of dry toilets in the gold mining town, which officials claimed were no longer there. After the article appeared, Mr. Bezwada was all over the news. Government officials wanted to inspect the situation themselves and Mr. Bezwada was called in to show them around.

In an effort to raise awareness beyond the gold mine, Mr Bezwada began visiting other towns and villages, traveling by bus at night, in an effort to mobilize and engage with the communities of manual scavengers he encountered talking about 'how we can get out of it'. he said.

A chance meeting with a retired bureaucrat in the early 1990s helped formalize his Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers movement, leading to both donations and volunteers.

Since the start of the campaign, and especially over the past decade, dry latrines have been largely eliminated in India, although Mr Bezwada said they can still be found in rural and semi-urban parts of some states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. He said he won't be satisfied until no more people pick up trash by hand.

In addition to working to eradicate the remaining dry latrines and replacing them with flush toilets, Mr. Bezwada's movement is also training former manual scavengers in other trades, such as tailoring, gardening and auto-rickshaw driving, and advocating for safer working conditions for all the waste. employees.

At least 90 sanitation workers in India died on the job in 2023, Mr. Bezwada said. Between 2017 and 2022, 373 people reportedly died while cleaning hazardous sewers and septic tanks, according to government data.

Mr Bezwada said his politics were shaped by the architect of the Indian Constitution, Bhim Rao Ambedkarwhich itself belonged to Mr. Bezwada Dalit caste. By reading Mr. Ambedkar, Mr. Bezwada said, his anger shifted from his community for not resisting, to the society and the government for pushing his caste into inhumane channels.

“They did this to protect the interests of the elite and upper castes,” Mr. Bezwada explained.

Even after nonprofits began supporting his work, Mr. Bezwada still traveled cheaply, often sleeping at a bus station and covering himself with the newspapers he liked to read during the day for warmth at night.

He mobilized manual scavengers and presented letters to municipalities demanding that they demolish the city's dry toilets. When cities refused, Mr. Bezwada and his volunteers sometimes took matters into their own hands.

“We took crowbars and started breaking them,” he said.

In 1993, he and his volunteers began documenting the existence of dry latrines across India and recording the death of every manual scavenger on the job. In 2003, the organization filed a petition in India's top court asking for strict enforcement of a law passed in the early 1990s that was intended to eradicate manual scavenging in India but was widely ignored.

It was only in 2014 that the court finally took action: it ordered state governments to pay compensation to the families of those killed while cleaning sewers and septic tanks; take strict measures to stop manual cleaning of dry latrines; and to retrain people engaged in manual scavenging with skills that would give them the tools for a more dignified livelihood.

In 2016 he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, also known as the Nobel Prize for Asia.

'I didn't have a good education. But a lot of real-life wisdom,” said Mr. Bezwada, assessing the reasons for his success.

However painfully long the wait for the court's decision was, the time was well used.

“The community was organized during the process,” Mr Bezwada said. “That's the reward. Even if I remain silent, there are thousands speaking out today.”

On a recent afternoon, a group of volunteers gathered in his office in Delhi for a meeting.

Mr. Bezwada coached them in the art of loud sloganeering for the ongoing campaign against sewer worker deaths.

“No one can win without fighting,” Mr. Bezwada told them. “Whatever victory has hitherto been won in the world has been solely due to struggle and struggle. But not every fight may yield results. The most important thing is the struggle.”