Forty-five-year old Anthaiah went missing while cleaning a septic tank in Hyderabad last year. After a complaint by the Dalit man’s family, civic officials rummaged through a pipeline, a lake nearby, but only managed to find his body six days later in a sewer line after they used a camera. Efforts to retrieve the body had gained momentum after an opposition uproar, amid allegations by Anthaiah’s family that the municipality was turning a blind eye because of their caste identity.
But it was not just a missing body, it symbolised India’s manual scavenging crisis, of missing numbers, caste discrimination, and a seemingly shoddy official response towards the existence of a practice long abolished by law.
