Uttar Pradesh, India, 13 Feb. 2010: Savitri (age 30)
Friedrich Stark, colour photograph, 2010
Most manual scavengers come from the bottom of
the caste order, and 80 per cent of them are women who inherit
their 'scavenging rights' at an early age. In 2003, workers
organised by the charity Safai Karmachari Andolan took to the
streets to burn the cane and bamboo baskets conventionally used for
carrying human excreta and to request strict enforcement of the
law, which banned manual scavenging in 1993.