New Delhi: With a spade in his right hand, 30-year-old Sudesh enters a big drain clogged with human faeces, animal corpses and industrial waste. He wades through the waist-deep stinking black water and takes out the nauseating floating muck from Delhi's many open drains.
"It does not matter how many times I bathe. The stink lingers for three days," Sudesh, who goes only by his first name, told IANS.
Sudesh, an asthma patient, has been cleaning a filth of the national capital for the past 15 years and has developed skin diseases. He is one among many sanitation workers who enter drains and manholes with only one piece of clothing - his underwear - every day to keep the drains running.
Ironically, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project Swachh Bharat Mission, launched Oct 2, which aims to clean up this country that has been notoriously callous about its public environment, has nothing to offer to these daily wage sanitation workers who are living a life of utter neglect.
Their work is as good as of a manual scavenger against which the Indian parliament enacted a stringent law in 2013.
Delhi's three municipal corporations alone (of five) have a total of 30,000 sanitation workers, including those on contract basis, on their rolls. But it is the daily wage workers and substitutes like Sudesh and Harish who face more problems, not just in Delhi - conditions in other cities are probably worse - but in the rest of the country.
"Many a time I have been rescued by my colleagues from drowning in deep drains. Entering into a 5-6 feet drain with the entire city's filth without a safety belt and other gears is like inviting death," Sudesh told IANS.
When IANS visited him, he was busy cleaning an open drain at Indraprasta Metro station in the heart of the capital with just a spade in his right hand while holding on to a rope tied to a tree. The rope was his safety belt.
"This is what we are compelled to do. We are not paid if we refuse to clean these drains. But we are not given the safety gears," Harish, another daily wage worker, stated.
According to the standards of safety, these workers should be wearing water-proof uniforms, rubber gloves and masks while entering drains.
Asked the reason for not providing safety gears, the mayor of South Delhi Municipal Corporation Khushi Ram said typically: I am not aware of this. I will look into it."