What is manual scavenging?
Manual scavenging is defined as “the removal of human excrement from public streets and dry latrines, cleaning septic tanks, gutters and sewers manually”.
Manual Scavenging (Prohibition) Act
India banned the practice under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (PEMSR).
The Act bans the use of any individual manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of or otherwise handling in any manner human excreta till its disposal.
The Act recognizes manual scavenging as a “dehumanizing practice”.
Swachhata Abhiyaan mobile app
The Swachhata-MoHUA is the official app of Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs(MoHUA), Government Of India.
The app enables a citizen to post a civic-related issue (eg; a garbage dump) which is then forwarded to the city corporation concerned and thereafter assigned to the sanitary inspector of the particular ward.
The app has been developed to identify and geotag the insanitary latrines data.
The compiled data will then be used to replace insanitary latrines with sanitary latrines.
Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 mandates insanitary latrines survey, their demolition and replacement with sanitary latrines.
The app was launched on December 24, 2020 to capture the data of insanitary latrines still existing and the manual scavengers associated with them.
Anyone could upload the data on the mobile app, which would then be verified by the district administration concerned.
Recently in news
Data on Swachhata Abhiyaan, a mobile app of the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry, identify 6,253 cases of manual scavenging in India. But the Ministry is not sure if the numbers are authentic.
The government said that 551 districts out of 766 districts in the country had reported as “manual scavenging-free”.
Confirmation is still awaited from the remaining 215 districts.
Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Tripura are among those which have reported all their districts free of manual scavenging.
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