“From March 22 to April 26, 2023, as many as eight people died while cleaning sewers in #Gujarat, raising concerns about the continuing deaths of manual scavengers despite the fact that the practice has been declared illegal across #India.”
This tweet provides a link to an article by TheHindu.com, essentially the Tweet summarizes that in India many sewage workers have been dying because they are manually cleaning out sewers without any sort of protective gear. The article claims that they mainly die due to asphyxiation because of poisonous gasses that are in the sewage systems in India. Both the article and the tweet states that this is an illegal practice.
I think that the overarching issue in this tweet is that the government has laws in place to prevent incidents like this from happening but does not have the reach or political influence in certain regions to enforce their regulations. I also believe that poverty and low education levels has a lot to do with this. Because many Indians are living in abject poverty, they are going to take any job that they get payed from even if it means risking their lives. In terms of education, the kind of people who are unfortunately taking these kinds of jobs are generally uneducated and don’t know about the risks of working in such unsanitary conditions. It is also very manipulative of the local governments to put people in these kinds of working conditions even after it was declared as illegal.