Plight of Sanitation Workers
The Hon’ble Chief Minister,
State of Tamil Nadu,
Chennai.
We the undersigned are writing to you in support of the demand of the sanitation workers of Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) related to the regularisation of their employment. The workers have been waging a struggle against the monthly contract system and have been demanding permanent status for past several years now. The governments in the past have not acted on their demands. The promise of ‘Governance of a New Dawn’ made by your government had instilled hope in them of getting their long-standing demands accepted, but their experience of the last few months has belied those expectations, and forced them to announce an indefinite strike starting from Monday, May 16, 2022.

Sanitation is a regular and continuing function of urban local bodies and hiring of workers for a permanent activity on contract basis, goes against the spirit and letter of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970. The contract system creates extreme vulnerability among workers in general, but usage of extreme form of monthly contract system is even more pernicious, given the nature of sanitation work.

Most of the workers involved in sanitation work for Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board are Dalits, and the contract system not only exploits their labour, but hinders any possibility of social mobility, forcing multiple generations of workers to continue in sanitation work. Absence of security of employment, weakens the ability of workers to assert their right to safe work and effectively demand adequate safety and protective gears.

For these reasons, we urge you to immediately accept the demands of the striking workers and put an end to this inhumane system of work, and thereby redeem your pledge of ‘Governance of a New Dawn’.

Our hope is inspired in large part by the fact that Tamil Nadu has a relatively exceptional record of implementing welfare measures in the cause of human development, and by the fact that your own party has been informed by a long history of pressing for socioeconomic equity and a just social order. By responding fairly and sensitively to the legitimate demands of sanitation workers, Tamil Nadu also has the opportunity of re-asserting itself as a front-line state in the matter of public welfare policy. This could well have a demonstration effect, in terms of setting an example which many other States of the Indian Union may feel compelled to follow.
Shiva Shankar, Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
S Subramanian,
Independent Researcher, Chennai
Siddharth K J,
Independent Researcher
Dr. Sylvia Karpagam,
Public Health Doctor

Discrimination against the Poor
Orissa High Court Chief Justice S Muralidhar on May 12 said that Indian laws were structured to discriminate against the poor.

“There are many barriers to accessing justice that a marginalised person faces,” Muralidhar said. “The system works differently for the poor.”

He made the remarks while delivering a lecture on the topic “Appearing In court: Challenges in Representing the Marginalised”, to mark the 131st anniversary of BR Ambedkar.

In his lecture, Justice Muralidhar pointed out that 55% of the 3.72 lakh people in India, who are awaiting trial, belong to the Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Classes.

Of the 1.13 lakh convicts, 21% belong to the Scheduled Caste and 37.1% to the Other Backward Class category, Muralidhar said. More than 17% of those under trial and 19.5% of the convicts are Muslims, the Odisha High Court chief justice said.

“Yet these are the persons who are likely to find it difficult to come forward to fight for their rights,” he said.

He added that many people who are under trial continue to remain in jail despite being granted bail because of their inability to arrange surety bonds.

Muralidhar also expressed concern about the quality of legal aid in the country for those unable to afford legal representation.

“The lack of confidence in the legal aid lawyer is a reflection of the general approach to welfare services by the providers,” he said, according to The Indian Express. “I call it the ration shop syndrome. The poor believe that if you get any service for free or it is substantially subsidised, then you cannot demand quality.”

The chief justice also cited a study that found that human rights lawyers belonging to Dalit and Adivasi were labelled as “Maoist or Naxalite lawyers”.
Scroll Staff

Sanna Irshad Mattoo
Kashmiri photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo has won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize award in Feature Photography 2022 category.

Mattoo has won the award alongside the Reuters team including late Danish Siddiqui, Adnan Abidi, and Amit Dave for the coverage of Covid-19 crisis in India.

Siddiqui was killed in Afghanistan while covering the Taliban takeover of the country.

In 2020, three Kashmiri photojournalists Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan, and Channi Anand had won the prestigious Pulitizer.

Mattoo’s work has appeared in several international publications. She worked with ‘The Kashmir Walla’ before moving to freelancing work.

The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition within the United States.

It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher, and is administered by Columbia University.
The Kashmir Wala, Srinagar

Workers Still Struggle for Rights
Today, in a time when only a tiny percent of the working people are unionised, and various sections of the unorganised sector are struggling to get specific laws passed and implemented in their favour—notably the construction workers, domestic workers, safai karmacharis, hawkers—the Central government has chosen to bring in four Labour Codes replacing 46 existing labour laws. Almost all unions across the political spectrum including on many occasions the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh affiliated to the BJP, have expressed apprehension regarding the impact of this enormous sea change of legal regime.

Forming a trade union has been made more difficult; the concept of a permanent worker or a Principal Employer have been abolished—now there will be term contracts and the contractor will be the employer; a vaguely defined floor wage (can anything be less than a minimum?) has been suggested; the requirement of maintenance of several kinds of registers and inspections has been done away with and replaced by self-certification; and trade unions will no longer have access to balance sheets to negotiate bonuses. A Joint Platform of Trade Unions called for a general strike on March 28-29 which many independent unions also supported. The demands were for scrapping the four labour codes, opposing privatisation and the National Monetisation Pipeline, supporting the demand for MSP for the farmers, enhancing the minimum wage etc. Though around five crore workers in the coal, steel, banking, postal services, copper, oil sectors did indeed strike work, the silence of the government is deafening.

Alas Sisyphus, the stone has to be rolled up all over again. But be sure, it will.

Sudha Bharadwaj

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Frontier
Vol 54, No. 48, May 29 - Jun 4, 2022