Jyoti Balmiki from Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, saw her mother go to do her daily manual scavenging work. At times, with a book to read, she followed her mother to work. Therefore, from the age of five, Jyoti has been a Safai Karmachari Women rights activist, focusing on rural districts of Madhya Pradesh in central India.

As a liberated woman scavenger, she organizes women from the community in National Community Region. “I worked for years lifting waste. After coming into the movement, I left the work and motivated women in my neighbourhood to move into other livelihoods, working to get them access to e-rickshaws or other means through Safai Karamachari Andolan,” states Meenu. She is instrumental for many women’s liberation from manual scavenging in her work since two decades.

Pammis is a women rights’ rights activist, instrumental in bringing many girls from the community out of scavenging, enabling girls to focus on education and other livelihood streams.

Poonam from Roorkie, Uttarakhand is a youth activist who started her engagement with the sanitation workers’ community in Dehradun in 2010 where her mother did manual scavenging work. She has led surveys to identify 2200 scavengers in Uttarakhand and organised 6000 workers in the region.

Pravesh Chhachhar migrated from Meerut to work in Delhi. He worked in the non profit sector but left the job after facing caste disrcimination. He then started an organisation focusing on English speaking courses within the manual scavenging community living in Rohini in north west Delhi.15. Preeti, from the Trilokpuri slum of Delhi organises school lessons and leads computer training in basic programmes for scavenging community girls and boys in an industrial shed in Trilokpuri, Delhi. She began community work five years back.

Raj Valmiki, Ranjit Nagar, Delhi is a poet, writer, and workers’ rights activist. His parents did not go to school and his mother worked as a manual scavenger to support his education. As an adolescent, Valmiki taught remedial classes to younger children to support his own education so that his mother did not have to continue manual scavenging to support his education. He earned a Masters in Social Work and as a member of the Dalit Writers’ Union, he has raised his voice against social inequalities as well as a strong voice against caste system. He is hopeful that the community through their struggle will completely eradicate the practice of manual scavenging.

Ravita Kherwal, Chandigarh lost her parents early in her life. She was brought up by her grandmother who worked as a manual scavenger and encouraged her education. She became the first woman to do a BA in her local community and started work as a youth activist in Dehradun and later relocated to Chandigarh. She has organized sanitation workers in Chandigarh and led a campaign to support families of seven sewer cleaning workers to get Rs 13 lakh compensation from the government after their deaths inside manholes. She is active in organising the community to access school admissions to institutions through the provisions in Right to Education for economically weaker sections.