New Delhi: As the Centre’s process to identify the number of manual scavengers in the country continues, state governments have reduced the number of “verified” people in the caste-based profession by more than half.According to the Indian Express, states were asked to verifying 54,929 manual scavengers identified across 170 select district – but have said that only 25,015 of those people were confirmed to be working in the banned profession.The Bihar, Haryana and Telangana governments have denied the existence of even a single manual scavenger in their states, even though hundreds had shown up to self-identify during the survey. Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Punjab have also brought down the number of manual scavengers considerably, the newspaper reported.Maharashtra is the only state to have verified all 5,638 people who registered themselves as manual scavengers during the survey. Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Karnataka too have verified a large proportion of the names registered.The current survey to identify the number of manual scavengers in the country was commissioned in November 2017. The first stage, which is ongoing, involves counting those who clean night soil (buckets and cesspools in which excreta is collected overnight) and pit latrines in 164 districts across five states. The second phase will look at people who clean septic tanks, sewers and railway tracks. The survey is expected to include those still engaged in the profession, as well as those who left it after 2013.Also read: Centre Doesn’t Know How Many People Have Died Cleaning Sewers or Received CompensationThe Indian government’s statistics on manual scavengers are grossly inadequate. As The Wire has reported before, there have been seven surveys conducted already to identify the number of manual scavengers, and each has come up with a different number. The official numbers vastly under-represent the reality, activists have been arguing for years.To try and get around this problem, grassroots organisations including the Safai Karamchari Andolan and Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan (RGA) were roped in to help the government with this survey. While recognising this as a positive step, activists had expressed concern that people may still be left out of the count during the verification process. “We just hope that names are not cancelled out on some sort of technicalities. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” Sanjay Dumane of the RGA had told The Wire while conducting a self-registration camp for manual scavengers in Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri.#Grit is an initiative of The Wire dedicated to the coverage of manual scavenging and sanitation and their linkages with caste, gender, policy and apathy.