Rain Causes Havoc In Bengaluru Sanitation Workers’ Lives
AICCTU Demands Immediate Relief And Rehabilitation
On May 16, 2020, several Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) sanitation workers had a lucky escape as a private wall around their slum area collapsed, narrowly missing their shanties. This incident happened in Kodigehalli (Bengaluru, Karnataka) when the torrential rain caused the soil erosion around the poorly constructed compound wall on a private land adjacent to the slums. The wall collapsed on several houses and forced more than 25 families to vacate their tents and move to their friends and families in the colony.
A team comprising CPIML and BBMP Powrakarmikara Sangha members immediately visited the site and pressed BBMP officials for immediate relief action.
All the inhabitants of the colony, which is visible as a line of shanties with blue tarpaulin against sky touching high rise buildings, are BBMP sanitation contract workers, known as Powrakarmikas. They are the backbone of Bengaluru’s municipal system, but they are forced to live in tents without even basic amenities like water, toilets etc.
On the same day, another Powrakarmikas’ colony was inundated with knee deep water due to the rain. This particular incident has caused immense financial losses to all the families in the area.
In Kodigehalli, there are about 70 families who have been living there for decades in sheds and shanties made out of tin sheets and tarpaulin. The indignity meted out to these workers by not providing them with proper working conditions, continuous sexual harassment and caste atrocities, has been extended to their living conditions with the BBMP utterly failing to provide any form of basic facilities such as toilets, pure drinking water connection, electricity connection, sewerage connection, among others to the workers here.
Despite most of the families in this slum being employed as sanitation workers and contributing a great deal in keeping Bengaluru clean and healthy with their labour and sweat, the BBMP has only dispensed indignity and negligence towards these workers.
The BBMP Powrakarmikara Sangha has been consistently raising the demand for free and quality housing for all powrakarmikas for the past several years, only for the officials to have fallen on deaf ears. This has pushed the workers into perpetual insecurity for the lack of shelter, especially during the monsoons.
Several families whose houses were damaged in the incident have sustained financial losses and the Sangha has vociferously demanded that the families be compensated adequately, so that the houses can be rebuilt. Additionally, the union has urged the BBMP to undertake a survey of all areas where sanitation workers are residing at present, within their jurisdiction, and to ensure that all the workers are provided with pucca houses for free of cost.
