Giving Compass' Take:

• Bezwada Wilson talks about building a Dalit-led grassroots movement to liberate the community from this practice.

• How can donors help organizations and movements like Wilson's?

• Here's how social change in India can happen if we give communities agency. 

Bezwada Wilson is a crusader against manual scavenging and the systemic discrimination that it perpetrates against the Dalit community. Born into a Dalit family that had been engaged in manual scavenging for generations, Bezwada channelled the outrage that stemmed from witnessing the injustice faced by his community to launch the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), a grassroots movement to eradicate manual scavenging. Since 1993, SKA has been at the forefront of a societal and legal battle that has been fought by volunteers across the country and has led to the liberation of thousands of Dalits from this dehumanising practice. In 2016, Bezwada was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of his efforts to “reclaim for the Dalits the human dignity that is their natural birthright.”

You have been running Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) for almost three and a half decades. What does it take to run a movement and sustain it for so long?
There has been no concerted effort to build something. There has been struggle though: a very real one. There was also anger and anguish, and that provided space for the movement to emerge. All we did was to consolidate that anger and channelise it. And that grew to become the Safai Karmachari Andolan. SKA is not even registered, because it isn’t a formal organisation—it’s more like a flow of movement—people keep coming onboard. And today there are nearly 4,800 volunteers across the country.

How did you start building awareness about manual scavenging initially?
In the beginning, the biggest hurdle was that there was no language to talk about the problem. Over time we spoke about liberation, rehabilitation, and elimination (of manual scavenging). But these are words that came later. When we started, all we knew was that nobody should be doing this kind of work.

Read the full article about this interview with Bezwada Wilson by Smarinita Shetty and Sneha Philip at India Development Review (IDR).