Coming down hard on Chennai Corporation over continuing with manual scavenging, which has reportedly led to a number of deaths since 1993, the Madras High Court has directed it to follow the law prohibiting this type of work as also various directions of the court in letter and spirit.
The first bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice R Mahadevan, gave the direction recently while dealing with a PIL on manual scavenging filed by ChangeIndia.
The court made it clear that the authorities must take note of all materials provided by the petitioner.
"The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 and directions of courts on the matter should be complied with in letter and spirit," it said.
In its response, the Deputy Commissioner (works) of the Corporation informed the court that steps had been taken to purchase 10 'Super Sucker' machines to unclog congested sewer lines without deploying men to manually clean them. Price bids for the machines has already been opened. One machine brought from Delhi was being utilized for the time being, he said.
He stated that though they had submitted on January 30, 2014 that 4,353 of 4,739 illegal sewer connections in the city had been plugged, it had come to their notice that the number of such connections could be much more and the inspection in this regard is continuing.
In addition to the 4700-odd connections, another 3290 such connections had been identified in all 15 zones, he said.
ChangeIndia director A Narayanan listed more than 150 people, with names and addresses, who had been killed during manual scavenging in Tamil Nadu since 1993.
The PIL sought a direction from the court to government to implement all provisions of Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013.
