In India, even today, many women continue to be engaged in one of the most inhuman and undignified forms of manual scavenging, which involves cleaning of insanitary dry latrines with bare hands, carrying the basket or bucket containing the human faeces on their head, and disposing of it, on a daily basis, despite the practice being forbidden by law.
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Due to the deep-rooted societal and systemic challenges these women face, most of them are unaware about their entitlements and rights, let alone have the voice to demand them. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, as the world commits to “Choose to Challenge”, it is critical to acknowledge the historical neglect and apathy these women have faced, understand their harsh realities, and prioritise action to support them.
Despite the existence of legal frameworks which strictly prohibit the practice of manual scavenging and mandate respectful and lawful rehabilitation of these workers, and the Karnataka High Court having noted this practice as “most inhuman” and violative of the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 21, it still continues in pockets across the country.
When one thinks of “manual scavenging”, the image that usually comes to mind is of men risking their lives while cleaning sewer lines, toilet tanks and drains. However, most of us don’t realise that women, too, work as manual scavengers, and while they may not face an imminent risk of death like men, the daily humiliation, health hazards, and lifelong neglect they are subjected to are no less excruciating.
There’s a lack of clear government estimates of the number of women engaged in manual scavenging, owing to which we have limited understanding on the extent of women’s engagement in this practice as well as their socio-economic vulnerabilities. However, estimates by several organisations suggest that more than 75 per cent of manual scavengers are women.
Such woman are usually from Dalit caste groups including those referred to as Bhangi, Valmiki, Mahar, Mehtar. A considerable number of women have started to leave this work in recent years, as a result of increasing awareness, as well as due to the success of large-scale sanitation drives under the Swachh Bharat Mission. However, in absence of a viable alternative income source, they struggle for the basic necessities. The double burden of discrimination they experience — as women and as members of the most marginalised social groups — adds to their woes. The pandemic has heightened their distress. In the absence of dedicated institutional arrangements to support these women, the question of who would take the lead in ensuring their empowerment and rehabilitation remains unanswered.
India has several legal mandates, government programmes and institutional structures to support manual scavengers. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation (PEMSR) Act, 2013 and the subsequent orders by the Supreme Court of India mandate justice, rights and freedom for manual scavengers.
Institutions such as the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, National Safai Karamcharis Finance and Development Corporation, state-level counterparts of these bodies, and district level authorities have been set up for the implementation of these. Furthermore, though there are programmes like the Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers (SRMS), the budget utilisation is far less than the allocation, indicating implementation gaps.
Many recent national-level policy initiatives have shown commitment to this cause, including a proposed inter-ministerial action plan for the elimination of manual scavenging. The Ministry of Urban and Housing Affairs’ programmes such as the Emergency Response Sanitation Unit (ERSU) and the Safaimitra Suraksha Challenge, and the Odisha government’s recent scheme “Garima” for the safety and dignity of core sanitation workers, are other recent examples.
However, in practice, most of the government schemes focus on improving the safety of sewer and septic tank cleaners. While the significance of these programmes cannot be denied, there is a lack of focus on women workers.
Moreover, systemic apathy towards such marginalised communities among the local administration has resulted in implementation gaps in the initiatives for identification and supporting women engaged in manual scavenging.
For example, a 2018 baseline survey, undertaken under WaterAid India’s project aimed at strengthening the rule of law to advance rights and freedom of manual scavengers, identified close to a thousand such women who are currently or till recently were engaged in manual scavenging in just 36 urban locations across four states.
However, the local administrations were not ready to accept that manual scavenging existed in their jurisdictions. As a result, most of these women struggled to even get enrolled under the government programmes. More recent field insights suggest that while the number of women currently working as manual scavengers have gone down due to Swachh Bharat Mission and similar initiatives, the majority of these women struggle to make ends meet and are yet to be recognised under the law, in order to access rehabilitation support and related entitlements, and take up alternative sources of livelihood.
In their hurried bid to declare cities and towns manual scavenging-free, many urban administrators seem to have reported the non-existence of the practice of manual scavenging, leaving many of these workers uncounted, which could have led to the inability or reluctance of the current administrators to formally enroll and support these women further. This might also explain the incomplete status of several enrollment surveys initiated so far, as well as the discrepancies in the available data. Among the few who do manage to get enrolled, a very small number of women are able to access their entitlements.
A series of stringent measures is required to ensure empathy and support to persons engaged in manual scavenging, with a conscious focus on women.
First, the guidelines for the SRMS need to be revised to include specific schemes, plans, targets, budgets and indicators for all categories of work that come under the definition of manual scavenging. This might be the only way of ensuring that women engaged in manual cleaning of insanitary dry latrines are prioritised and covered by such schemes.
Second, all the affidavits, declarations and submissions made in the past by various urban and district authorities, which claim that their area is free of manual scavenging, should be declared as null and void, and a fresh identification of specific categories which have been left out should be mandated, with specific instructions for including women currently/ previously engaged in manual cleaning of insanitary dry latrines.
In addition, a special mandate must be given to the urban and district administration to organise camps that ensure the enrollment of all these women and their families under schemes for supporting manual scavengers, as well as under other programmes around health, education, nutrition, social welfare, employment/livelihoods among others. Incentives need to be provided to officials who accelerate the identification, enrolment and provision of benefits for persons, including women, engaged in manual scavenging. Punitive measures need to be introduced for cases wherein the officials fail to enroll them and provide the mandated benefits.
Third, coverage of women currently or previously engaged in manual scavenging should be ensured under the National Urban and Rural Livelihood Missions. Inclusion of these women can be specifically recommended under the National Urban Livelihoods Mission’s existing mandate which ensures that at least 10 per cent of the persons covered under the SHGs and other initiatives are the vulnerable urban poor.
Fourth, the enrollment of children of persons engaged in manual scavenging in schools, educational institutions and skilling programmes must be mandated, while also ensuring access to scholarship and other support measures. This would be essential to break the inter-generational cycle of inhuman work and oppression.
Finally, special financial incentives must be provided to households with insanitary dry latrines, wherever present, for conversion to sanitary latrines.
Acknowledging the existence and challenges of these manual scavengers, especially the women who continue to remain unseen and unrecognised, is a necessary first step towards ensuring that their rights are recognised and guaranteeing their freedom from this inhuman practice. Only by “Choosing to Challenge” this situation, can we support them in their quest towards justice, dignity, and sustainable alternative livelihoods.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.