Mumbai: Lawyer fights Maharashtra govt for 3 women who lost husbands to manual scavenging

Advocate Isha Singh at her Fort office with Vimla Govind Chorotiya (left) and Neeta Santosh Kalshekar, whose husbands died after they got trapped inside a septic tank at the Morya Society in Govandi on December 3, 2019. Pic/Ashish Raje

At 26, advocate Isha Singh has the grit of a "people's lawyer". Singh, who is daughter of former IPS officer YP Singh and lawyer Abha Singh, both well-known activists, has spent the last two years fighting the cause of widows, Vimla Govind Chorotiya, Neeta Santosh Kalshekar and Baani Bishwajeet Debnath. The three lost their husbands in an incident on December 23, 2019, after they got trapped inside a septic tank at the Morya Society in Govandi. The trio, based on police reports, were hired to clear a clog in the drainage tank. Incidentally, just a few days before this mishap, the Bombay High Court had heard a PIL filed by Singh, which highlighted that though manual scavenging has been banned in India under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Rehabilitation Act, 2013, the practice continues unhindered. Both these events set the ball rolling for a milestone judgment last week, when the HC directed the Maharashtra government to pay R10 lakh compensation to the three women.

In the meantime, Singh has become a sister, friend, and guide to the group. Vimla and Neeta, who we meet at her office in Fort, say, if it were not for her, they wouldn't have known of their legal right to compensation.

Manual scavenging has been banned in India since 1993. In 2013, a new law on the ban came into force, which also listed specific rules for employing labourers if needed in exceptional situations, which included giving them proper protective equipment and gear, and providing for exhaustive rehabilitation. Pic/Getty Images

Singh, an alumnus of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, took up their case pro bono. "I have always wanted to work for the people," she says, "…because the masses still lack access to justice and information about their rights. The laws, unfortunately, are available only to the elite. And, I think, we, as lawyers, can do the job of fixing this."

When Singh decided to take up the case, she had already been researching about manual scavenging. "[Before the incident] we had put in RTI pleas with the BMC, asking how many people had died cleaning sewers and septic tanks in Mumbai. The BMC replied saying since 2014, no deaths had taken place. This, I thought, was insensitive to families who had suffered such a loss [in the past]," shares Singh. An RTI plea seeking information on the safety gear being provided to manual scavengers, also came back with a disappointing response. "They were being provided basic safety, like cloth or surgical masks, which is not enough. This has always been a caste-based occupation, and there's no dignity of labour here," feels Singh. Manual scavenging, she informs us, is banned in India since 1993, under the Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act of 1993. What made the new 2013 Act different was that it listed specific rules for employing labourers if needed in exceptional situations (for instance, when mechanised sewage cleaning cannot be done), which included giving them proper protective equipment and gear, and providing for exhaustive rehabilitation. "And the onus for this rehabilitation is on the district collector," she adds. During the research, they learnt that in 2014, in the case of Safai Karamchari Andolan Vs Union of India, the Supreme Court had also defined a compensation of R10 lakh to be paid to those, who lost their lives while manual scavenging. "We found RTIs on the Internet, which revealed that in Maharashtra, not a single case of compensation had been paid," shares Singh.

When she read a news report on the death of the three labourers in Govandi, she decided to trace their families with the help of journalists. "This was about the gross injustice [meted out to them]. I wanted to take this case to its logical conclusion." Soon after, she wrote to the district collector and the police, regarding the FIR. "The practice [in such cases] is to slap Section 304 (A), which refers to death by negligence, which is a bailable offence," says Singh, who cleared the IPS exam this week. "When you learn about zero compensation and convictions in such cases, you realise why this
apathy prevails."

Vimla, a mother of three, belongs to the Mochi community from Rajasthan, who are traditionally shoemakers and listed under the Scheduled Caste. Her late husband, Govind Chorotiya, started taking on work as a daily-wage labourer 13 years ago. On the day of the incident, he had left home early, to go to Chembur naka, where he'd usually wait with other labourers, to be hired by contractors. "I had no idea that he was going to work at a drainage site. As far as I know, he mostly worked on construction sites," she tells us in Hindi. Neeta, who runs her home by working at a packaging station in the APMC Market in Sanpada, says her husband Santosh Kalshekar was a plumber by profession. She didn't know either that he worked in sewers. It's probably why their deaths came as a big blow to
their families.

A few months after the incident, the pandemic broke out. The subsequent lockdowns left these families in penury. Baani, who had an 18-day-old son, when her husband Bishwajeet Debnath, had to move with her two children - her daughter is now five years old - to a relative's home, because she couldn't afford to pay rent. A homemaker until then, she now washes clothes and utensils to earn a living. "Ishaji is our savior," says Neeta. "We didn't have money to travel to court, so she'd give us cash each time. All she expected from us, was to show up on time."

Singh says that the state government had tried to wash its hands off the case, as the incident had taken place in a private society. "But, sanitary work comes under public health," she says. Coincidentally, a GR was issued just nine days before the mishap, on December 12, 2019, which put the onus on the private sector to
pay compensation if such an incident occurred.

A division bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Madhav Jamdar described the case as an "eye-opener" and said that "this was where the strict liability of the state comes in". "This judgment is a huge win for every safai karamchari in the state," feels Singh. The HC has even ordered that the widows be compensated within the next four weeks, and asked the state government to apprise the court about the rehabilitation measures taken for persons identified as manual scavengers under the 2013 Act. "The court has gone the extra mile in their order, which is why now, we should not stop at any cost, at least for Maharashtra. We need to ensure that there's zero tolerance to manual scavenging in any form. That's the goal we are going to work towards."