Manual Scavenging: Stark Reality of Human Rights Violation

Bezwada Wilson

Bezwada Wilson is an Indian activist and co-founder and National Convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), an Indian human rights organization that has been campaigning for the eradication of manual scavenging, the construction, operation and employment of manual scavengers which has been illegal in India since 1993. His work at SKA, a community-driven movement, has been recognized by the Ashoka Foundation which has nominated him a Senior Fellow. In July 2016, he was honoured with the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Mr Wilson is associated with the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics at Kandawari, Himachal Pradesh. At Sambhaavnaa Mr Wilson facilitates the Nayi Dishayein program.

Khusdeep Kaur Malhotra

Professor Kaur is a human geographer who studies place-based precarity and belonging among micro minority communities living in fraught contexts. Her dissertation, which she is currently working on converting into a book manuscript, examines the everyday spatial practices that allow Kashmiri Sikhs to navigate precarity and sometimes even employ precarity to secure belonging rather than sever it. Professor Kaur is also interested in understanding the production of geographic knowledge in India through encounters between citizens and the State, and the changing notions of citizenship that these encounters produce. To this end, she is working on a project examining the digitisation of land records through oral cartographic knowledge transmissions in the Patwaris’ offices in Kashmir.

Methodologically, Professor Kaur is trained in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using open-source software such as QGIS and proprietary software such as ArcGIS. She hopes to employ QGIS to develop participatory methodologies that contribute to grounded visualisation, marrying her skills in qualitative analysis and mapping. Currently, she is also learning satellite data analysis to understand land use change and web mapping in the programming language R.