The estimated 10,000 "volunteers" in charge of slum cleanliness under the abandoned Swachh Mumbai Prabodhan Abhiyan (SMPA) are looking at a dismal future as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is seeking bids from contractors for its new slum cleaning initiative.
At the BMC's M East ward office on February 28, some 300 employees and representatives from various organisations assembled in protest.
The BMC had declared in December 2023 that the SMPA scheme would be discontinued, and in February, it called for bids from potential contractors to handle slum cleanup. The local authority announced that at an annual cost of INR 350 crore, 7,388 workers would be employed under one contractor for each of the 26 wards.
The BMC termed the SMPA programme a failure, claiming that the sanitation volunteers' lack of accountability was the reason the programme had failed to clean the slums. The Dattak Vasti Yojana of 2001, which was deemed a failure because of corruption, was launched before the SMPA in 2013. The Dattak Vasti Yojana was essentially renamed as the SMPA, and the two plans were nearly identical.
SMPA relied on sanitation volunteers from women's self-help groups, employment cooperatives, non-governmental organisations, and other organisations. One of the protest organisers, Sangita Kamble, voiced worry about their future. The Vasti Swachata Abhiyaan Samanvaya Samiti is a group of NGOs that operate in the M East ward. She questioned what would happen to the people who worked under the scheme. A large number of them have spent 20 years working in the slums.
However, the protestors also concurred that there are many issues with the current plan. To begin with, the volunteers receive a pitiful INR 5,400 a month in compensation. Additionally, because of their technical categorization as "volunteers," they are not eligible for any job benefits or protections.
Additionally, the organisations are only paid INR 600 per volunteer per month for administrative costs like ID cards and the like, and they must submit bids for the SMPA contract every six months. The Jan Haq Sangharsh Samiti and other organisations have also expressed opposition to the SMPA system, and there has long been a call for its revision.
Even though the new contract included enhancements like paying workers up to INR 20,000 per month over the minimum wage, the protestors were still against it. More crucially, there was no assurance that the SMPA workers would continue to work for the new contractor, despite their claims that it would diminish their agency and make them submissive to the contractor. When questioned, a representative from the solid waste department of the BMC stated that, at this time, there were no formal arrangements to ensure that the previous volunteers were included in the new contract because that was up to the contractor.
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