Out of Breath

The lives of manual scavengers in Tamil Nadu

- UTKARSH

IN OCTOBER 2015, two Dalit manual scavengers named G Muniyandi and D Viswanathan died while cleaning an underground lift station—where sewage from nearby localities is collected before it is transferred to a pumping station—in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The days that followed saw protests demanding compensation for the families of the deceased as well as the arrest of the contractors involved. The activist and filmmaker Divya Bharathi, who was present at the protests, began working on a documentary titled Kakkoos—the Tamil word for “toilet.” M Palani Kumar, who worked as a cinematographer on the film, told me that at least eighteen more manual scavengers died by the time it was completed, in 2017.

“This troubled me a lot,” he said. “I felt responsible to carry forward my work, so I continued to work on this subject even after the film.” Since then, Kumar has travelled across various districts in Tamil Nadu, documenting the atrocious conditions in which manual scavengers continue to live, work and die.