No end to manual scavenging in Trichy

TRICHY: The tall claims and promises by authorities on eradicating manual scavenging in Trichy city are nothing but a lie as the practice of deploying humans inside manholes to clean clogs in the underground drainage (UGD) chambers is still plevalent. Trichy City Corporation has never given priority to finding a solution to end the inhuman and dangerous practice.
About 35% of Trichy city is covered under sewage network through 60,000 houses and commercial UGD connections. Residents who dump sanitary napkins, diapers and even vessels in the sewers cause blockages of the UGD lines. The corporation uses a sewer jetting machine mounted on a truck or a mini-load van to clear the block. The machines using water pressure will remove the blockages in sewers. But to fix the machine’s nozzle at the exact location of the clog, sanitary workers have to enter the UGD chamber.
"Getting into the UGD chamber and coming into contact with faecal waste amounts to manual scavenging. If entering the chamber is inevitable, all safety gear should be used to avoid contact with the waste," a city-based expert in sewage management said.
A total of 12-15 such manual scavengers hired through private contractors are employed in the four zones of the corporation for the purpose. But the corporation has never tried to find an alternative to this practice or to make the inevitable job safe. Kumbakonam municipality had purchased a semi-automatic robot to clean the UGD chambers, but no such machine was purchased for Trichy city.
Officials said that the automatic sewer cleaning machine like the one in Kumbakonam will only do vertical cleaning. For horizontal cleaning such as removal of blockages in sewers, most of the civic bodies still rely on the manual scavengers. "We have planned to study the super sucker machine used in Chennai for safe cleaning of UGD blockages. A suitable machine will be purchased," a senior official with Trichy City Corporation said.