SANITATION workers of Bengaluru, under the banner of BBMP Guttige Pourakarmikara Sangha, held a protest on 9 July 2019, demanding action against Harshvardhan PN, an Assistant Conservator of Forest (ACF), Karnataka Forest Department, who had said that they will be made to eat lunch next to stinking garbage so that they are sensitised to the need to clean it better! He said, “We’ve made arrangements for them (sanitation workers) to have lunch near the main entrance so that they feel the impact of the dirty smell. Our idea is to make the pourakarmikas realise their responsibility to keep the surroundings clean and clear the garbage.”
At Vengayyana Lake in Bengaluru, 30 trucks dump garbage every day, which 20 sanitation workers have to sort by hand, separating dry from wet waste. This garbage - much of it raw sewage - flows into the lake and causes an unbearable stink. The workers - all of them Dalit women - have to wade into this putrefying waste every day in order to sort it. They do not produce the garbage - they sort the garbage that the city produces. And now, a Forest Officer not only blames them for the stinking garbage but proposes to humiliate and punish them by forcing them to eat next to the stink.
Workers protested against this anti-Dalit atrocity, demanding action against the officer. The protest forced the Forest Officer to distance himself from his statement claiming he had been misquoted.
But the Forest Department, instead of acting against the officer, defended him. Ms. Dipika Bajpai, representing the Department, tweeted that Harshvardhan’s suggestion was aimed to sensitise the workers. If the workers were “allowed” to eat next to the lake, she wrote, they would feel like “a stakeholder in the lake.” Her tweet echoed the spirit of her colleague’s proposal that workers would be ‘sensitised’ to clean up the lake better if they ate lunch next to the stink.
The BBMP Guttige Pourakarmikara Sangha continues to fight for the dignities and rights of sanitation workers.
