A black head emerges, followed by a torso. The bald man is helped by two men and places his hands on either side of the manhole, pulling himself up. Out of breath, the man, who appears to be in his late 40s, sits on the edge of the manhole wearing only black trousers the same color as the putrid, swirling water he emerged from.
This is an all-too-common scene in Karachi, where the city’s more than 20 million residents discharge 475 million gallons of wastewater per day (MGD) into a decades-old and crumbling sewer system.
“I’ve proven to my superiors that I can do the job well,” said Adil Masih, 22, who has made more than 100 sewer dives in the past two years. He hopes to be promoted from a kacha (casual) to a pucca (full-time) employee at Karachi’s government-owned Karachi Water and Sewerage Company (KWSC), formerly known as the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, or Water Board, within the next six months.
Adil earns a monthly salary of 25,000 rupees ($90) and receives a lump sum of 75,000 rupees ($269) every three months, and once he becomes a pucca his salary will rise to 32,000 rupees ($115), the minimum wage set by the Sindh provincial government.
“The first time is the scariest experience,” recalls Amjad Masih, 48, a man with a metal earring in his left earlobe. One of 2,300 sewer cleaners employed by KWSC to manually unclog drains, he said he had instructed Adil on how to avoid diving into the mud. “You have to be smart to beat the death that accompanies you as you go down,” he said.
Opening a manhole cover doesn’t expose you to swarms of cockroaches, foul stench or rats swimming in filthy water. What worries people who go down there to scoop up buckets of rocks and filthy silt are the floating blades and used syringes.
But entering the sewer system is a last resort: “First, we try to unclog the drains with a long bamboo handle, but when that doesn’t work, we go down into the gutter and clean it by hand,” explains Amjad, who has been working for the Water and Sanitation Company since 2014 and became a full-time employee in 2017.
Poison Cauldron
City authorities say they are providing workers with personal protective equipment to protect them from chemical, physical and microbial hazards, but many workers, like Amjad, refuse to wear it.
“You need to feel the rocks and stones with your feet to lift them,” he says. “Nothing happens,” Adil adds. “We go to the doctor to get treated and then go back to work.”
Former KWSC staff speaks IPS One manhole digger, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been several casualties. “It’s the supervisor’s responsibility to make sure only people who comply with safety rules are sent into the manhole,” he said. As well as the risk of loss of life, there are certainly health risks, so protective gear should include a gas mask, ladder and gloves “at a minimum,” he said.
Beyond the physical dangers, what is killing these cleaners is the invisible danger that threatens them in the form of gases such as methane, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide that are produced when wastewater containing chlorine bleach, industrial solvents and gasoline mixes with the concrete in the drains.
Earlier in March, two young sanitation workers, Arif Moon Masih, 25, and Shan Masih, 23, died in Faisalabad, Punjab, after inhaling toxic fumes. In January, two workers in Karachi suffered a similar fate while cleaning a sewer pipe.
Some 84 sewer workers have died in 19 districts of Pakistan in the past five years, according to advocacy group Sweepers Are Superheroes. In neighbouring India, one sewer worker dies every five days, according to a 2018 report by the National Committee for Safai Karamchari.
“Once, I almost died,” Amjad recalled, when he was “gassed” and lost consciousness. “Luckily, I completed my mission, regained consciousness and then collapsed.”
However, he said, a number of his colleagues have inhaled the gas and died while inside the building.
Adil said he has inhaled the gas a few times: “My eyes burn, I regain consciousness, I vomit, drink a cold fizzy drink and get better,” he said, but the last time it happened he lost consciousness and had to be hospitalised.
Over time, they learned to take precautions, Amjad says.
“We open the manhole cover before going in so the gas can escape,” he says, adding that dead rats floating on the surface of the water are a sign of the gas’s presence.
KWSC cleaners work in teams of four. One person goes down in a harness attached to a rope. If something seems wrong or when they’re done, they pull the rope and three men waiting outside quickly pull them out. But the men are pulled out after three to four minutes without waiting because “they might be unconscious,” Amjad explains. “Sometimes you have to go 30 feet deep,” which means they can hold their breath for around five minutes, Amjad claims.
Adil can only dive to a maximum depth of seven feet and cannot hold his breath for more than two minutes, but he finds Gus in shallow ditches, which are often filled with not just buckets of mud but also stones and rocks that must be lifted out to allow the water to flow freely.
Amjad and Adil, like other KWSC cleaners, also take on private jobs, something the KWSC knows about but turns a blind eye to. “If we can earn a little extra, that’s fine,” an official said.
“Residents and restaurant owners ask me to open their blocked drains and I can earn a decent living by working for a few hours,” Adil said.
Cleaning work is only allowed for Christians
Adil and Amjad are not related by blood, but they share the same surname, Masi, which hints at their religion: both are Christian. According to WaterAid Pakistan, 80% of sanitation workers in Pakistan are Christian, but Christians make up just 2% of the total population, according to the 2023 census. A report published in 2021 by the Centre for Law and Justice (CLJ), “Shame and Stigma in Sanitation,” links sanitation work to the ancient caste system that was widespread in the Indian subcontinent and linked occupation to birth.
“While this cruel practice is largely disappearing in Pakistan, sanitation work is perhaps the only occupation where this traditional caste system persists,” the report said.
The CLJ report includes a survey of employees at the Water and Sanitation Authority (Wasa), which provides drinking water and ensures the smooth running of the sewerage system, and the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC), which collects and disposes of solid waste from households, industries, and hospitals in Lahore, Punjab. Wasa has 2,240 sanitation workers, 1,609 of whom are Christian. LWMC has 9,000 workers, all of whom are Christian. 87 percent of employees in both organizations believe that sanitation is for Christians only, and 72 percent of Christian employees said their Muslim colleagues “don’t think this job is for them.”
The same is true in Karachi: Until about five years ago, the KWSC advertised jobs for sewer cleaners, specifically recruiting non-Muslims, but stopped after receiving criticism from human rights groups.
“We removed this condition and started hiring Muslims to clean the sewers, but they refuse to enter the sewers,” a KWSC official said.In Punjab, a discriminatory policy of hiring only non-Muslims from minority groups for cleaning work was scrapped in 2016.
Half of Karachi is being excavated and new drainage pipes are being laid, but much of the work is being done by Pashtuns (Muslims from one ethnic group) and, until last year, Afghans. “They’re wading in the same dirty water,” Amjad says.
He took a much more lucrative job working as an apartment cleaner and earning more money.
“Being a permanent government employee means lifelong security. You have a job for life,” he explains, “and your day-to-day life is a little easier. You won’t be harassed by the police, you’ll have sick leave, free medical care, you’ll have retirement benefits, and you won’t be fired at someone’s whim.”
Our goal
However, Amjad and Adil’s work and the treatment they receive from their employers stand in stark contrast to the Pakistani government’s signed up to Sustainable Development Goals, particularly goal 8 “Improve working conditions for sanitation workers”. It also seems unlikely that goal 8.5 “Decent work with full employment and equal pay” and goal 8.8 “Protect labour rights and promote safe working environments” will be achieved by 2030.
Farah Zia, Chairperson of Pakistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, IPSnoted that Pakistan has made little progress in meeting adequate working standards for sanitation workers, who are considered one of the most “marginalized labor groups” in Pakistan’s workforce.
Zia said the women were “not paid a living wage, nor allowed to live in an environment free from social stigma”, and were not provided with adequate safety equipment or training to protect themselves from occupational hazards. She added that the 2006 National Health Policy was outdated and “inadequate to address these concerns”.
The same was true in Sindh, where Amjad and Adil live. “The Sindh government adopted a provincial sanitation policy in 2017, but it did not address the concerns of workers in the province regarding their working and living conditions,” Zia noted.
In 2021, WaterAid Pakistan (WAP), in line with SDG 8, worked with the local government in Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district to ensure the safety of sanitation workers. In addition to providing safety equipment and access to clean drinking water, the organisation is advocating for “these essential workers to get the respect and dignity they deserve”, said Muhammad Fazal, head of WAP’s strategic and policy programme.
Naeem Sadiq, a Karachi-based industrial engineer and social activist who has long fought for the rights of these men, calculated the highest and lowest salaries in the public sector.
“In the UK, the ratio of salary between a cleaner and a top-ranking bureaucrat is 1:8, while in Pakistan it is 1:80. In the UK, the ratio of salary between a cleaner and a top-ranking judge is 1:11, while in Pakistan it is 1:115. In the UK, the ratio of salary between a cleaner and a top-paid head of a public institution is 1:20, while in Pakistan it is 1:250,” he said. IPS.
Sadiq has called for a total ban on manual scavenging: “I don’t understand how our people can enter sewers bubbling with human waste and toxic gases,” he said. IPS“We need machines to do this dirty and dangerous work,” he added.
“KWSC has 128 mobile tanker-like devices equipped with suction jets to remove water from sewer pipes, allowing cleaners to descend down to 30-foot manholes rather than having to go into them to remove silt, wood and stones that cannot be sucked out and have to be lifted manually,” a KWSC official said.
For Sadiq, that’s not good enough: A year ago, he and a group of philanthropists came up with a prototype for a simple drain cleaner built from a motorcycle frame, which Sadiq says is the cheapest in the world, at 1.5 million rupees (US$5,382).
“It can be pumped deep into the sewer system to pull up stones, rocks, sludge and silt, and then use high-pressure jetting equipment to unclog the pipes.”
It’s now up to the government to use the design and begin manufacturing the device, called “Balay” (kindness, blessing). “We are happy to share the design,” Sadiq said.
Header Image: A sewer worker nicknamed Mithu emerges from a sewer. Photo by Zofin T. Ebrahim/IPS
This article originally appeared on Inter Press Service and is reproduced here with permission.
