In a bid to review the implementation of the prohibition of employment as manual scavengers and their rehabilitation Act-2013, State Chief Secretary Subhash Kumar convened a meeting with officials on Monday.
During meeting CS has directed officials to prepare rules following on the Act by April and directed them to fix the accountability of urban development department, social welfare department and home department.Similarly work needed to be done on converting dry latrines and time for rehabilitating the scavengers determined.
It was stated during the meeting that a survey of the number of people cleaning human waste by hand had been undertaken at the time of the state’s formation. As many as 537 sanitation workers from among 1972 identified were rehabilitated. By 2010-11, of the remaining 1435 workers, 392 were rehabilitated. The rest were transferred to government or semi-government employment, or had retired, passed away or migrated. It was said that according to the 2011 census, there was a total number of 131 such workers in Hardwar, Udhamsinghnagar, Nainital, Dehradun, Pithoragarh and Champawat. A plan had been made to rehabilitate them.
During meeting Principal Secretary, Social Welfare, S Raju, Secretarty, Urban Development, DS Gabryal, VC, MDDA, R Meenakshi Sundaram, Additional Secretaries Ranjeet Sinha and Nitesh Jha amongst other officials were present there.