To tell you the truth, the government is merely announcing new schemes. It has set the deadline of 2019 to rid India of open defecation and is spending a whopping Rs 2 lakh crore on the construction of new toilets. But it has earmarked only Rs 5 crore in this year’s budget for rehabilitation of women scavengers. The government has also allocated Rs 30,000 crore to invest in its bullet train project and has set a deadline for its completion, which I am sure will be met. But it cannot fix a deadline to end manual scavenging. Manual scavenging is still going on in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir and a few parts of Jharkhand. After three years of the Swachh Bharat campaign, 1.6 lakh women are still engaged in manual scavenging. The courts pass orders, but it is for the government to enforce them. The government, however, will never do it because then somebody in the system has to be punished. If at all anybody is punished, it has to be the scavengers. Somebody has to say they have been wronged over the centuries. They need to admit they have committed blunders and offer apologies to the Dalits. That is not happening.