CAG sniffs out scavenger scam

This is a scam with a difference, a scam concerning scavengers in India. Among the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tabl...

This is a scam with a difference, a scam concerning scavengers in India. Among the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tabled in Parliament today is one which details how the decade-long effort of the Government to end scavenging has failed. And how Rs 600 crore have gone, literally, down the latrine.

There are some shocking aspects about the CAG study on the plight of manual scavengers who carry the night soil of urban and rural India. First, that it took four decades for the Government to come up with a Central scheme to liberate and rehabilitate scavengers in 1992.

And that the current review was conducted 10 years after the Government pledged to rehabilitate four lakh scavengers but has ended up with the number of scavengers almost doubling to 7.87 lakh.

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CAG had dubbed the Government’s efforts of ending manual scavenging as ‘‘sporadic, uncoordinated and poor.’’ About the 1992 National Scheme of Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers, the auditors concluded, ‘‘it failed to deliver its social vision after 10 years of continuous but regrettably half-hearted efforts.’’

The aim of the 1992 scheme was to rehabilitate scavengers and to rid them of their occupation. And the review, CAG has admitted, was a sensitive one since it ‘‘addresses the lowest occupational class mired in the vicious cycle of a hereditary system unmitigated by economic change or social reform.’’

As in every Government scheme, misuse of funds and falsification of targets has been rampant. Many instances of frauds were detected. For instance, units set up for rehabilitation of scavengers in Andhra Pradesh were found to be non-existent. In Assam, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, scavengers under the scheme were not listed in records.

The larger picture that CAG traced in the scam is that the shortfall for training of scavengers set by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment was a high 68 per cent at the end of the Eighth Plan. That during the Ninth Plan, the budgetary commitment was slashed by Rs 170 crore (a 41 per cent decrease), reflecting on the Government’s commitment. That year after year, allocations would be hastily released in the last quarter, despite heavy unspent balances.

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The Government scheme, CAG has concluded, is ‘‘a prisoner of its own statistics’’ and has failed to link scavengers’ liberation through conversion of dry latrines and construction of flush latrines with their rehabilitation. In fact, while the Ministry claimed to have rehabilitated 4.71 lakh scavengers in the past decade, the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development projected that only 0.37 lakh scavengers were liberated.

CAG notes how the explanation for the scheme’s failure was awaited for several months but the report was finalised without comments.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More