Authorities feign ignorance, say action would be taken against those who perpetrate this injustice

Little Kanku Waghela doesn’t know much about her caste, but at her school in Changodar village of Sanand – the would be boom-town waiting for the Tatas and their state-of-the-art Nano car plant – she is never allowed to forget her place in the social order.

As the day starts, all students of her school are asked to clean up the compound. There's a catch, though. While students from the higher castes get on with tidying the fields and the classrooms, Kanku and her fellow students from the Valmiki-vaas begin their exclusive daily assignment, cleaning the school lavatory, which no child from the higher caste is asked to do.

Kanku’s case is no exception. Across many such villages in rural Gujarat, Dalit children are the ones who have to clean the toilets in their schools. School authorities hasten to claim that all students are made to clean the school compound and there is no discrimination along caste-lines. But the reality cannot be wished away.

“Yes, we are asked to help clean the premises,” says Dhvanika Vaghela a Class VI student from Kadi Kanyashala No 4. “But girls from other communities never pass by the toilets . It is only us (Dalits) who must do the lavatory cleaning. We clean the toilets using brooms and a piece of tin that we are given,” she adds. Last month, she says, she fainted while cleaning the toilet.

Kiran Jagadia, who was in the same school, says: “It is always girls from our community, who will be called and asked to clean the school toilets.”

... contd.