One would not be surprised to find that Dalits form the overwhelming majority of the thousands of ‘Pourakarmikas’ in what is now called the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA). A major section of them are also Dalit women. The official Kannada term for their occupation is a cover for its horrors.
‘Poura’ means city or civic, and ‘karmika’ means worker. According to the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 1976, Pourakarmika means “a person employed in collecting or removing filth, in cleansing drains or slaughter-houses or in driving carts used for the removal of filth excluding night soil”.
Recently, a video of GBA Minister and Vokkaliga leader Krishna Byre Gowda interacting with Pourakarmikas went viral and drew widespread cheers from his supporters. In this minute-and-a-half monologue, the Minister is seen responding angrily to drivers and helpers working in garbage vehicles who requested him to regularise their employment.
Gowda’s diatribe needs quoting at some length to help readers take in the full import of his words as well as the feudal and casteist mindset behind it.
Here’s one: “Why should we make you permanent when you are not even interested in coming for work? Instead of asking for permanency, you all should learn to work first. You all have learnt words to speak; instead, first learn to work.”
How does this sound: “Those who have been made permanent do not come to work, and we cannot even question them. The city is stinking, and we have to face the abuses. You have nothing else except this. Do you have the thought of doing your work faithfully? Yes, you say; those are only words”.
Here’s another: “You must have little humanity. You must have the intention to exert your labour when you wake up in the morning. You see this area and find that it is stinking. You want nothing else except to become permanent.”
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder of the biopharmaceutical enterprise Biocon, volunteered to be Krishna Byre Gowda’s most notable cheerleader, and remarked that “our pourakarmikas need to first demonstrate responsible workmanship,” and that “unless the city is clean, no question of permanent jobs”.
A minister and an industrialist from dominant, privileged sections of society seeking to ‘crack the whip’ on those who are perceived as not doing a good job of removing rotting garbage with their bare hands. Apart from being offensive, their statements divert from the actual questions that need to be asked about how we deal with our waste and those who clean it.
Although the sector as a whole has been consistently under-funded by successive governments, waste management has generated enormous riches for the garbage mafia. While the mafia comprising contractors, civic officials and politicians share the spoils, caste exploitation, labour violations and health hazards continue to mark the lives of Pourakarmikas.
Only some castes of people have been cleaning filth before this city became the GBA, the BBMP, the BMP or the BCC; before this city became a municipality. They were assigned waste management as a caste occupation centuries before they were renamed ‘Pourakarmikas’. The respectability that the term seeks to bestow is rendered meaningless because it hasn’t changed the material reality of their lives.
Though the law prohibits it, the Pourakarmikas continue to handle all forms of rotting garbage with their bare hands, including human shit and animal carcasses. This megacity that is now called the GBA, is also the place where people directly dump garbage and even shit into open drains; biomedical waste is secretly dumped in street corners; and the concept of four-way garbage segregation at source is still science fiction.
For this work, only one section of the workforce, i.e. sweepers, has been made permanent, while the rest (drivers and helpers in garbage vehicles) are under the contract system, which is a den of corruption resulting in siphoning off public money by the nexus of officials, contractors and elected representatives. Contracts are given to a cartel of contractors who have influential political patronage.
A large number of contract pourakarmikas are shown on record, whereas a lesser number of workers are actually employed, and they are siphoning off the wages and benefits of the non-existent workers. Even ESI and PF contributions of the workers are not deposited and are siphoned off. While public money is being looted by contractors, the pourakarmikas who are performing this work are being seriously exploited without payment of minimum wages and are being deprived of a life of dignity.
The mafia behind this industry is a worthy adversary for Krishna Byre Gowda, a leader from a ruling caste in a ruling party. His industrialist cheerleaders too could join in this fight. While they fight this good fight, maybe they could also ensure access to drinking water and toilets for Pourakarmikas.
Pourakarmikas routinely face casteist and classist prejudices and biases from the very people whose health they protect. Not being given drinking water by households, are told to stand away from house gates, being spoken to rudely, among other forms of discrimination. While work-from-home was the norm during COVID, the Powrkarmikas struggled through the lockdowns to keep the city clean and were told to stay away from the gates of the houses whose garbage they collected daily.
The casual, derogatory remarks by the Minister and his cheerleaders about one of the most oppressed sections of society are a predictable consequence of the ideological foundations of a dharma-driven society. In recent years, the emphasis on duty-based ethics derived from dogmatic Hindu dharmic traditions has gained much popularity.
The Union government’s policies also reflect the very same bias.
For instance, the “Draft National Labour & Employment Policy - Sharam Shakti Niti 2025” declared that the policy was rooted in the ancient texts such as the Manusmriti, Yajnavalkyasmriti, Naradasmriti, Sukraniti, and Arthashastra that apparently “embedded the moral basis of labour governance within India’s civilisational fabric, centuries before the rise of modern labour law.”
The Purusha Sukta hymn of the Rig Veda compartmentalised society into four sections, with the shudras and the untouchables at the bottom, confined to a state of permanent servitude which must continue through to their future generations as well. Manusmriti proscribes that shudras have no right to accumulate wealth and must live off of whatever is given to them by the trivarnikas in return for their work. Ambedkar classified this as a system of ‘division of labourers.’ The jajmani system and the balai system are also manifestations of a duty-oriented system wherein a class of people must perform their duties first and always, without expecting anything in return. The jajmani system involved the lower castes providing various services to the upper castes in return for remuneration provided in kind by the latter. The Balais were an untouchable community in Madhya Pradesh upon whom high-caste Hindus imposed several obligations in 1927, the most notable ones being that:
“The Balais must render services without demanding remuneration, and must accept whatever a Hindu is pleased to give. If the Balais do not agree to abide by these terms, they must clear out of the villages.”
These rules had to be signed by the Balais on a stamped agreement; otherwise, they would be subjected to various forms of boycotting by the caste-Hindus. This incident has been chronicled by Ambedkar in his seminal text ‘Annihilation of Caste.’
Duty-based frameworks have historically been imposed on the caste-oppressed, Ambedkar points out and says that the Manusmriti maintains a system where the brahmins enjoy all the privileges and the shudras and untouchables bear the burden of duties.
While rights-based frameworks provide fundamental guarantees to citizens against oppression, duty-based frameworks make one’s rights conditional on the performance of duties first.
The Pourakarmikas have to perform sweeping and garbage collection duties in the most inhumane manner, such as collecting garbage with their bare hands. The very nature of the work of handling all kinds of hazardous, rotten and smelly garbage entails serious occupational health hazards, including back problems, joint pains, high blood pressure and respiratory and heart-related illnesses due to unhygienic working conditions.
This, of course, is worsened when Pourakarmikas do not even get a weekly off, let alone festivals and national holidays! They are exposed to the worst health and occupational hazards, as highlighted by two official committees: the IPD Salappa report (1976) and the Chandrashekar Committee report (2013). Pourakarmikas have been performing their share of duties for centuries now. On the other hand, the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 mandate amongst the ‘duties of waste generator’ that they must:
“segregate and store the waste generated by them in four separate streams at source namely wet waste, dry waste, sanitary waste and special care waste; and hand over segregated waste to authorised waste pickers or waste collectors as per the direction or notification by the local authorities from time to time”
There are 10 other rules that are prescribed under Rule 5(1) (a)-(k) by the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 for ‘waste-generators’ enacted under the Environment Protection Act, 1986.
But when waste-generating citizens and establishments are not abiding by the rules explicitly directed at them, on what account is the demand being made of pourakarmikas? What is being demanded of them is to fulfil their caste duty as per the ancient shastras. The law that is in force now, which is the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026, makes no such demand of the waste managers. Their job is to collect and transport waste that has already been segregated and not clean up rotting piles of mixed waste.
Gowda and Mazumdar’s implication that regularisation of pourakarmikas must be conditional upon the performance of their dharmically assigned duties amounts to public humiliation and degradation of a community whose occupation is defined by historical caste stigma. Ambedkar ensured through his authorship of labour laws and the Indian Constitution that dignity is distributed through rights and not duties, which Gowda and Mazumdar, blinded by their caste and class privileges, are unable to gauge from their brahminical ivory towers.
However vicious this oppression has been, historically there have been battles for better living and working conditions as well. One recalls the valiant struggles of the sanitation workers of Calcutta Corporation in the 1920s when they organised themselves under the banner of the All Bengal Scavengers Union and the Workers’ and Peasants Party, demanding union recognition, increased wages, housing and latrines, free medicine and treatment, an end to corruption, 15 days annual casual leave, and paid leave for a month per year.
Around the same time, the sanitation workers of Madras Corporation struck work in 1924 demanding an increase in wages and supply of 4 measures of rice. These struggles have continued across the country before and after Independence. In Karnataka, Pourakarmika Unions raised the demand for abolition of the contract system, a battle they won in part when the State accepted regularisation of all sweepers with the promise that the drivers/helpers too would be regularised in due course.
Today, when again the State seeks to recast exploitation as duty, and inequality as tradition, there has to be the insistence on the primacy of rights and the dignity of Pourakarmikas, both a warning and a programme.
Clifton D’ Rozario is the National Vice-President of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions and has been involved in organising with Pourakarmikas for the past 20 years.
Ashna Singh is an Assistant Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University. Caste and Law is her core area of research.
Views expressed are the authors’ own.