By Maya Palit
Wardens at a hostel for HIV-positive people in Uppal, Hyderabad have been arrested for apparently forcing minor girls to clean a septic tank. The hostel, run by an NGO called Ambassadors of Goodwill for AIDS Patients Everywhere (AGAPE), has about 50 children staying in it. Apparently the tank had been full, making the washrooms unusable for a few days before the incident.
Achyuta Rao, an activist from Balala Hakkula Sangham, a child rights organisation, showed a video of the girls cleaning the drainage to the police. They then registered cases under Section 75 of the Juvenile Justice Act, which involves subjecting children to cruelty.
But the warden and supervisor were released on bail on Sunday, although a notification has been sent to the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, Delhi, so that some form of action is initiated against the heads of the orphanage.
There isn’t anything new about this lackadaisical attitude to manual scavenging, and recently Kakkoos, a documentary by film-maker Divya Bharathi showed exactly how rampant the practice still is across the country and the government’s indifference to it. It made clear how women working in the field have it particularly bad because they tend to work night shifts and are frequently sexually harassed, and how the multiple annual deaths resulting from manual scavenging get swept under the carpet. But all that this incident in the Hyderabad hostel clarifies is that children in an orphanage can also be coerced, at great personal risk, to clean septic tanks.