Madras High Court awards ₹10 lakh compensation to kin of manual scavenger who died 24 years ago

The Madras High Court recently directed the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) to pay compensation of ₹10 lakh to the surviving legal heirs of a 22-year-old man, who died 24 years ago while clearing a sewer blockage in Chennai.. Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy said that the case at hand violated all tenets of human rights.“The demand drafts shall also be accompanied by a letter of apology on behalf of this society as a whole, which is responsible for a fellow human being sent inside the sewer line for cleaning and for the delay in disbursing the compensation,” the High Court said.The Court went through the first information report and the case papers to hold that there could be no doubt that the deceased, a contract worker, died while he was employed as a manual scavenger “when he was sent inside the underground sewer without any protective gear.”.The Court also commented on the society’s responsibility and said that manual scavenging deaths might not occur if citizens maintained sewers and drains “as pristine as their arteries.”“When we, the inhabitants of the city, push everything inside the drains and sewers indiscriminately, it is nothing short of a homicide by an insensitive society. How many more lives do we want to sacrifice before learning that we must treat and maintain our sewers and drains as pristine as our arteries carrying blood?” the Court said..The Court made the observations while allowing a petition filed by one C Kannaiyan, the father of the deceased, seeking directions to the CMWSSB to pay him due compensation..Kannaiyan told the Court that he had filed an application before the Deputy Commissioner of Labour in 2002, two years after his son’s death, seeking compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1923.The application was kept pending for five years and was then dismissed for default in 2007 due to the absence of the claimant. It was, however, restored in 2008 following a sub-application Kannaiyan filed, but the authorities dismissed it once again on the same ground of non-appearance of the applicant.In 2009, Kannaiyan took out a second sub-application for restoring his claim for compensation and urged the Deputy Commissioner of Labour to also condone the delay in filing the sub-application. The officer, however, refused to condone the delay, prompting Kannaiyan to move the High Court in 2010..The Court allowed the petition, saying that it did not need any elaborate reasoning, and that compensation needed to be awarded in line with the Supreme Court’s previous directions issued in 2014 that mandated that every death due to manual scavenging must be compensated with ₹10 lakh to the family of the deceased. “Suffice it to state that one of our fellow human beings had died because of manual scavenging. This violates all tenets of human rights,” the High Court said..Advocate A Prabhakara Reddy appeared for the petitioner.Additional government pleader K Surendran and Advocates GT Subramanian and Jeery VV Sundar appeared for the State and municipal authorities..[Read Order]