Tied not only to their hands but also to their daily wages, GPS-enabled watches have kept safai karamcharis (sanitation workers) in Chandigarh under constant anxiety ever since the gadgets were introduced by the Municipal Corporation in 2020. With no laws or regulations yet to be formalised to check misuse of such monitoring devices, many legal experts feel that this “constant and dehumanising” surveillance must be stopped immediately.
The Corporation introduced the watches to glean attendance of these workers and check the misuse of the manual attendance system. The workers, however, complain that the device have made them a modern-day slave.
The sanitation workers, however, complain that the device has made them a modern-day slave.
