March 30, 2009
India’s “untouchables” trudge through sewers
For all the progress seen in India’s transformation into a modern global economy, the country remains strongly tied to the traditions of its caste system, which largely governs where Indians work and in what jobs.
Worldfocus special correspondent Martin Himel reports on the lowest form of work, for members of India’s lowest class.
9 comments
How can one fight agaist a religion that has been around since 400 bc. The best way to change this is through education. Educate people that if you don’t treat others like you would like to be treated, they will come back in their next lives as an Untouchable.
Unionanization of these labourers will enable their situation. This is absolutely human rights violation. The basic cause is the dreadful caste system of India. We need to fight the caste system and the rights of the labourers are to be protected.
The work done in the sewers of India is a necessary service and those working on the municipal sewer collection systems should be respected for their contributions to the society. The problem is that India’s ethics are in the sewer when it comes to thinking that humans should be divided into higher and lower castes. India is considered to be a place of spiritual knowledge, but apparently their spiritual knowledge has been forgotten or flushed down the toilet. The last time I checked into the teachings of Shiva or Krsna, they proclaimed that all are the progeny of one supreme source and that social equality is just a matter facing up to reality. I think the caste system is based on something much nastier that what can be found in sewers, namely, ignorance, greed and exploitation.
Human beings do not come from monkeys. We do all however come from the same two people, Adam and Eve. In that sense you are correct, and all the same this sort of treatment is wrong.
Is there someway I can help the lady that is the center of the
news segment. Her name & can I help her with some money
towards her work? To encourage her in her work. It is all so
terribly sad for her & what she does for others so important.
Gail Reitzel
If only Human Thought could crawl out of the Sewers of the Confinements of Circular Thinking as this Person/Human/Man is crawling out from the Circular Space of a Previous Thought into a more Present Thought as to where he need not remain
for any Indefinite Duration when these more undefined Durations continue to remain in modes of parallells to Time’s periodic miscomprehended yet concious catastrophes which spill out as Ink Uncontrolled upon various Pages of the Sketchbooks in which all our Lives our worked out to find more useful respresentations by their daily and nightly annotated and hence reviewed interpretations of ongoing subconcious Paginations
to the sum of all our Actions undertaken in an Existence which is presently understood only finitely…on a Sphere rotating on an Axis of a Single Subconcious Language which animates all currently understood concious Communications.
When addressing the “untouchables” in India I love the quote by a leading Indian thinker (P. R. Sarkar): “I often say that the caste system is hypocrisy – unreal. If you analyze the caste of human beings you will find that the ancestors of every human being were monkeys. In that case everybody’s caste is monkey caste. All this hypocrisy is to be given up. Is it that the ancestor of a Brahman-caste human being was a Brahman-caste monkey and that of a Rajput-caste person a Rajput-caste monkey?” (P.R. Sarkar, 1980)
Good work to focus on this outrage.
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11/19/2009 :: 02:17:58 PM
Thomas Says:
How can India be called or considered a democracy? They are a disgrace of a nation to allow this form of opression and slavery. They remain Hindu fanatics, regardless of their economic growth, they remain provincial and brutal to these people, to their fellow indians. Those that remain in the cities and call themselves cosmopolitans do absolutely nothing about this. And trust me, it is way worse in the rural areas.