The Prime Minister’s project aimed at getting rid of human scavenging has been handed over to a single agency — the Urban Affairs and Poverty Alleviation Ministry. The ministry has a deadline of 2007 — set by the PM who intervened two years ago — for freeing the nearly seven lakh human scavengers.Despite the fact that for almost 12 years many agencies participated in the project for ‘‘total elimination of manual scavenging’’ and Rs 660 crore was spent, the scheme has reached nowhere and this has been noted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) in its recent report.The report charged the ministries of Urban Development and Social Justice Empowerment with a ‘‘casual’’ approach and ‘‘not exchanging notes on their respective jobs — conversion of dry latrines and rehabilitation of the safai karamcharis,’’ as the scavengers are referred to in official texts.According to the CAG report, in all these years, only 37,000 karamcharis have been weaned away from scavenging as against the targetted four lakh — it is another reality that their population has grown to seven lakh. ‘‘There was no evidence to suggest if those liberated were in fact rehabilitated,’’ the CAG report says.Now, the Urban Affairs Ministry finds itself in the driver’s seat of a scheme where it has to begin afresh. ‘‘We need to go in for a national census of the safai karamcharis,’’ says a consultant from the national task force set up by the PMO to monitor the scheme.
