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In waist-deep water, they dredged ponds to aid idol immersions
New Delhi
New Delhi
As a new truck arrived at the Nirankari ground in north Delhi’s Burari near sunset, 27-year-old Sonu Kumar immediately waded to the centre of a nearby artificial pond. He then hurriedly started dredging the undissolved remains of previously immersed idols in the water body to make space for the new ones.
When his co-worker, Sagar, asks him to be delicate with handling the remains of the idols, he responds, “There is nothing left in there that can break any more. Just look out for glasses and other sharp objects, they can hurt you.”
On Tuesday, more than 500 Durga Puja committees in the city immersed idols of deities in artificial ponds created by them or those created by the Delhi government across the city.
In adherence to directions of the National Green Tribunal issued last month — which asked the Delhi government to explore ways to find alternatives to idol immersion in the Yamuna — the city government had dug up 116 artificial ponds of different depth and dimensions and issued an order prohibiting idol immersion in the river to avoid pollution.
The government also engaged contractors, who would deploy sanitation workers in those water bodies, to clean up the remains of immersed idols and make space for new ones throughout the day to ensure that the rituals of idol immersion was not disrupted.
On Tuesday, Sonu and Sagar were two such sanitation workers who spent their entire day in waist-deep water in one such artificial pond – a job for which they were paid Rs 350 each as wages by contractors, besides tips from the Durga Puja committees that ranged between Rs 51 to Rs 501. By 5 pm, they said, they had dealt with the immersion of 21 sets of idols
On Tuesday, HT spoke to several sanitation workers who were employed in artificial ponds. Most of them worked between 6am and 6pm, most of the time in waist-deep water, for wages between Rs 300 and Rs 500 for the day.
“The work would have been easier if people knew the right way to do immersion,” said 20-year-old Altaf Mohammed, who was employed at an artificial point in northeast Delhi’s Wazirabad.
Mohammed pointed towards his co-worker helping a group which immersed a set of idols as a whole, comparing it with another puja committee group which did it in instalments, separating the Durga idol from those of Saraswati, Lakshmi, Ganesh and Kartik. “If they are doing it for the first time, then so are we. People need to be a little more empathetic,” he said.
Altaf said that the job was a monetary relief for him. “In labour chowks, we hardly get 15 days of work in a month. The wage has also dropped in the last few months, so has our overall income,” he said.
Sonu, who is the sole breadwinner of a family of five and Sagar, who has a family of three, echoed similar sentiments.
For the bigger set of idols, the workers said the undissolved debris took anything between 45 minutes to an hour to clear. For the smaller ones, 20 to 30 minutes were enough. The district administration said that they had scheduled immersion timings for the Durga Puja committees in a manner that the labourers got adequate time for clearance.
“If everything goes well, we have been told we will get work for the next two days when the government starts filling up these ponds,” said Rajesh Kumar, 33, a labourer employed in another artificial pond in Model Town.
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