AFP - Wednesday 2 July, 2008
Scavenger women of India attend the United Nations
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — Usha Chaumar was seven years old when she began collecting human excrement with her mother in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan.
By the age of 10 she had married and, with her mother-in-law, continued going from house to house performing this demeaning task.
“They used to call me ‘Bhangi’ (part of the lowest of Indian castes) and treat us badly,” Chaumar, now 33, told AFP in an interview here.
She was one of the country’s estimated 700,000 so-called human scavengers on the lowest rung of India’s social hierarchy, who for centuries have had the wretched task of cleaning toilets and collecting human excrement. . .
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