Three men went into a sewer drain pipe at the Bantala leather complex on the eastern edge of Kolkata on Sunday morning to clear it by hand. They did not come out alive.
Police named the dead as Suman Sardar, Hasi Seikh and Forjem Sheikh. Families in the area were left waiting for the bodies to be recovered, and tension hung over the site.
How they died is not yet settled. Police have not ruled out either of two causes: drowning in wastewater that had collected in the pipe, or breathing poisonous gas from the sewage. A post-mortem, which can only follow recovery of the bodies, is expected to give the answer. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which controls the pipe, had made no comment when the report was filed.
A ban handed down a week earlier
The deaths came days after a Supreme Court bench led by Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia ordered a complete stop to manual scavenging and sewage cleaning in six big cities: Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. The court told the heads of the municipal bodies to file affidavits by February 13 describing what they had done to end the practice and when it would be fully stopped. The next hearing is set for February 19.
The National Human Rights Commission has also taken up the subject. At a recent discussion on the rights and dignity of manual scavengers, experts suggested robots could do the work of cleaning sewer lines and septic tanks. NHRC Chairperson Justice V. Ramasubramanian said the causes need to be studied and understood before remedies can be proposed.
