‘Will the budget help marry off my daughters?’

“Will this annual fuss over the budget even slightly change our lives?” asks K. Nagamma, a single mother of two. Her husband died in 2007 while cleaning a septic tank—a tragedy that led her to the Safai Karamchari Andolan, where she now serves as a convenor. Her eldest daughter, Shyla, is a nurse, while the younger one, Anandhi, holds a temporary government job.

“‘Budget’ is just a fancy word for us. We can’t even manage a budget at home with what we earn, and we’re excluded from the government’s plans. What budget anyway? Will it help me marry off my daughters?”

Nagamma’s parents had migrated to Chennai before her birth and so she was born and raised in Chennai. She was married off by her father in 1995 to his sister’s son who lived in their hometown, Nagulapuram. In this village near Pamuru in Andhra Pradesh’s Prakasam district, her husband Kannan worked as a mason. The families are from the Madiga community, listed as a Scheduled Caste. “In 2004, after having two children, we decided to come to Chennai for our daughters’ education,” Nagamma recalls. Within three years of doing so, Kannan died.

Living in a cramped house along one of the narrow lanes of St. Thomas Mount near Guindy, Chennai, Nagamma’s life hasn’t changed much since I last met her five years ago. “Even when gold was 20-30,000 rupees per sovereign, I hoped to save bit by bit to buy one or two sovereigns. [Sovereign is roughly 8 grams]. Now, with the price of a sovereign at between 60-70,000 rupees, how can I afford my daughters’ weddings? Maybe we’ll only manage if gold stops being part of marriages.”

After a reflective pause she adds quietly: “Forget gold—what about food? Gas cylinders, rice, even the cheapest milk packet in an emergency feels out of reach. I pay 2,000 rupees for the same amount of rice I bought for 1,000 just a year ago. But our income remains the same.”

Her frustration deepens as she speaks about the struggles of manual scavengers in whose cause she has become a full-time activist. “Nothing has improved for them,” she says. “SRMS* became NAMASTE, but what’s the point? At least under SRMS, we could form groups and get loans to live with some dignity. But under NAMASTE, they give us machines—essentially forcing us to do the same job my husband died doing. Tell me, will a machine give us dignity?”

SRMS: The Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers, 2007 was renamed NAMASTE or National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem in 2023. But as Nagamma points out, it reinforced rather than changed the lives of manual scavengers.