Most of us won't look twice at a manual scavenger, due to various reasons, social, economical, discriminatory, and even dehumanising. You just feel you're lucky that you don't have to do the job that they have to do, and frankly you should indeed be glad for that, the workers who depend on manual scavenging are often uneducated and support their family through various small jobs, including lowering themselves into sewers and putting their health at risk every now and then, just so our plumbing system works. In exchange, they make less than Rs. 500 per descent, they get insulted for doing the job nobody else would do, their children are discriminated against, and there are a few people that want to deny them their reservation rights, but that is a story for another time. 

Officially, Manual scavenging is illegal, but sadly there have been very little provisions to actually stop the need of manual scavenging to exist in the first place, and the scavengers themselves, with no other craft to turn to since nobody would hire them and the fact that they lack education, often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, between a choice of going without a job or going back into scavenging. A choice I sincerely hope none of you reading this will ever have to face in your lives. 

It is heart warming, then, to see that the Telangana government helmed by K. Chandrashekar Rao has made a step in the right direction by commissioning 70 mini sewer jetting machines to end the dehumanising practice in Hyderabad. The machines, which are currently already being put to use by the HMWSSB were dedicated to the organisation by Telangana's IT minister K.T. Rama Rao, or KTR as his many adoring fans know him. 

It warms our hearts to see the TRS's commitment to easing the pain of the margianlised in the state, and we hope to see more initiatives by the Government of Telangana to support those who often seem to fall through the cracks of society.