2 STP workers found dead in Bengaluru, five booked

The two were Bio Centra India employees. They were working on a sewage water treatment plant at the Prestige Falcon City Apartment on Kanakapura Road in Anjanadri Layout when the accident happened around 7 pm, police said.

Bengaluru police booked five people after two workers employed to clean a sewage treatment plant (STP) at an apartment in Konankunte were found dead under mysterious circumstances on Saturday evening, officials said on Monday.

Bengaluru police booked five people after two workers employed to clean a sewage treatment plant (STP) were found dead (Agencies/Representative use)

Police said the deceased were identified as Ravi Kumar (29), from Gollarahatti village of Koratagere taluk in Tumakuru district, and Dilip Kumar Jana (25), a native of Odisha.

The two were Bio Centra India employees. They were working on a sewage water treatment plant at the Prestige Falcon City Apartment on Kanakapura Road in Anjanadri Layout when the accident happened around 7 pm, police said.

They were found unconscious, and the police were not informed about the incident until 10 pm. In a complaint, Kumar’s wife Sashikala said she got to know about her husband’s death around 9 pm, from Ramesh, a supervisor at Bio Centra.

Following her complaint, the Konankunte police registered a case of death by negligence under Section 304A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against five people - Mukthiyar Ahmed, owner of the firm where the two victims worked, Prabhu, electric in-charge, Ramesh, the field officer, management of the apartment complex and the owner of the apartment.

“The FIR has been registered, and all the procedures have been done. Now, we are waiting for the postmortem reports. The deceased were septic tank operators, and they were found dead near the treatment plant. It is not manual scavenging. They are septic tank operators. We are yet to ascertain the cause behind the deaths, whether it was due to electrocution or due to leakage of any gas,” the Konankunte police said.

Further investigation is underway, the officials said. The bodies were shifted to the KIMS Hospital for postmortem, after which the police released them to the families.

Despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (MS Act, 2013), which prohibits the practice of manual scavenging, it is prevalent across the country.

As per section 2(1)(g) of the Act, “Manual scavenger means a person engaged or employed for manual cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any manner, human excreta…”

According to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), a body under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 1,054 people have died till December 31, 2022, due to hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks. The highest number of such deaths have been reported from Tamil Nadu, where 231 persons have died, while Karnataka accounts for 86 deaths.

Meanwhile, in August last year, the Centre said in the Lok Sabha that 330 people have died due to “hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks” from 2017-2022. It has, however, maintained that there have been no deaths due to ‘manual scavenging’ in the country.

Uttar Pradesh, with 47 cases, has topped the list of deaths due to “hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks,” followed by Tamil Nadu (43), Delhi (42), Haryana (36), Gujarat (28) and Karnataka (26).

Meanwhile, advocate Maitreyi Krishnan, who had taken the issue of manual scavenging to the Karnataka high court in the past, said, “Only when people die, such incidents come to the forefront. But day in and day out, people are performing this work. The government is supposed to do the identification and rehabilitation of such workers, and that has not been done.”

“The incident occurred in a huge apartment complex which has state-of-the-art facilities. To bring about a change, people should know that manual scavenging is illegal. Secondly, we should look at the vulnerability that pushes people to do this work. Nobody does this out of choice. Thirdly, even after the second law, identification and rehabilitation still have not taken place. Then there is the central government making statements that there are no deaths due to this,” Krishnan added.

The incident also comes against the backdrop of Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman making an announcement on the sewage system while presenting the Union Budget 2023-2024.

With nearly ₹100 crore allocation for the newly christened NAMASTE (National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem) scheme, Sitharaman said that the Union government is looking to enable 100% mechanical desludging of septic tanks and sewers in all cities and towns. “All cities and towns will be enabled for 100 per cent transition of sewers and septic tanks from manhole to machine hole mode,” she said.