BBC Radio 4's powerful interview with a manual scavenger

Manual scavenger with a cart, Gujarat.

Credit: WaterAid

The British broadcaster BBC Radio 4 featured a powerful interview with a manual scavenger in Bihar, India, on its Today programme.

Manual scavenging is the job of physically removing human excrement from latrines. More than one million people, mostly women, are consigned to this inhumane occupation in India, forced largely by social convention, despite it being made illegal in 1993.

Listen to the interview on the BBC website here 

WaterAid has been campagining on the demeaning and illegal practice and published a hard-hitting report earlier this year called Burden of Inheritance, which called for the eradication of manual scavenging.

According to Indira Khurana, the report's co-author and WaterAid's head of policy in India:

"India takes pride in a constitution which guarantees a free and dignified existence to all its citizens. However, the vibrant face of modern India has an ugly stain – the practice of manual scavenging. A section of society continues to be forced to work in stinking sub-human conditions by a centuries-old custom."

Find out more and read the report here