Interview with the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR): ‘COVID-19 disproportionately affected India’s Dalit women sanitation workers’

Abstract

Shakuntala, a mother of eight, used to work as a manual scavenger in a village called Chamari in India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh – whose population at over 200 million is larger than that of Brazil. Shakuntala is the sole breadwinner for her family as her husband is ill and bedridden. Whatever little she earned, stopped during the pandemic, especially during the lockdown months. They survived on one meal a day. ‘The local villagers gave us some flour and lentils, and that’s how we managed to eat once a day’, she says. ‘Whom shall I share my problems with? How will the people suffering along with us help? We haven’t benefited from any government schemes during the pandemic.’ Shakuntala is a Dalit woman. Her experience is no different from what others from her community experienced during the pandemic. Another Dalit woman, Urmila who was a farm labourer lost her livelihood during the pandemic. Now she waits to collect leftover vegetables and grains from vegetable markets to survive. The farm where she worked before the pandemic paid everyone for the days of work they did before the pandemic. However, she and her brother-in-law did not receive their pay. When she went to access the government-provided ration, she was surprised to find that her name was not on the list of beneficiaries. These testimonies were collected by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), to assess the impact of COVID-19 on India’s 200 million strong Dalit community. Despite their number, they are among the most marginalised and oppressed communities worldwide. In India’s highly oppressive and hierarchical caste system, the Dalits (or the so-called ‘lower castes’) lie at the absolute bottom. While India has advanced economically at a rapid pace in the last seven decades, the community remains socioeconomically marginalised. The pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have reproduced the same exclusion and discrimination faced by the Dalit and Adivasi communities for centuries. The pandemic had also impacted them disproportionately – with over 51 per cent of Dalits having lost their livelihood during the lockdowns as opposed to 31 per cent of upper-caste workers (Chakravarty et al. 2021). Also, Dalit women continued to be the most vulnerable in terms of equal access to opportunities, welfare programmes and social benefits, and fears of sexual violence. They are also disproportionately engaged in precarious work such as manual scavenging – which