Manual Scavenging: An Indian Tradition That Is Blessed With Immortal Powers.

Behind India’s gleaming skyscrapers and high-tech facade, there is a tragic truth that refuses to disappear. While the country marches forward with grand development schemes, plethora of individuals continue to walk into sewers and septic tanks, usually coming out as dead! Manual scavenging—a practice prohibited on paper but still prevalent, continues to be India’s largest hidden shame. The question haunts us: how long will India continue to put its own citizens at risk for this lethal occupation prohibited years ago?

Death by Design: The Endless Toll of Manual Scavenging

On March 16, 2023, Panth Lal Chandra passed away in a hospital after he was discovered unconscious in a sewer in New Delhi’s affluent New Friends Colony. The 43-year-old had traveled to the city from Chhattisgarh in search of a better life, but he ended up taking life in lethal manholes without safety equipment. Two others who descended with him—Ramkishan Chandra, 35, and Shiv Das, 25—escaped the same fate but were forced to visit the hospital. All three were knocked unconscious by the toxic gases that lurk beneath India’s capital city streets.

This was not an isolated incident. A month ago, two laborers died while cleaning sewers in Narela, a suburb of Delhi. In October 2022, three individuals died in Pillanji village in southwest Delhi. In May 2022, another individual died outside a mall in Rohini, where a 32-year-old man succumbed to toxic gases, and another individual was admitted to the hospital. In February, more tragedy struck Keshav Puram in northwest Delhi, where two men suffocated due to insufficient air while attempting to remove metal objects from a sewer.

These are only the instances that come to the news. The actual numbers are far more worse. Official statistics released by Ramdas Athawale, Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, indicate that 377 individuals lost their lives between 2019 and 2023 cleaning sewers and septic tanks in India. In Delhi alone, there have been over 72 sewer-related deaths reported between 2013 and 2023, as indicated by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis. But campaigners against the practice claim that these figures are far less than the actual number, representing just a small portion of the actual scale.

But who hears when the voices belong to society’s most marginalized?

Instead of taking accountability, what followed was the famous ‘Blame Game’: A Bureaucratic Masterclass in Denial

There was no speedy justice or speedy reforms after the death of Chandra. There was only the old game of shirking responsibility by the officials. The Delhi Police and the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) disagreed over the fate of this incident. An early inquiry by the police found that the victims were working for the DJB under a manhole in the New Friends Colony area when they suddenly lost consciousness. However, the Board stated that the three males were not DJB regular employees nor DJB contractual employees. Oh, and here’s the catch: they’re not permanent DJB hires, but rather work for private contractors who are eventually granted bids by DJB.

Here comes the problem—a gap so wide you could drive a sewage truck through it. To avoid accountability, civic agencies like as the MCD and DJB, who are in charge of water supply and sewer maintenance, outsource the work to private companies. These agencies issue tenders through the Government of Delhi’s e-Procurement System, offering contracts to the lowest bidders—firms that provide temporary, frequently inexperienced labor.

Azad Mehra, a DJB field assistant and CITU member, himself describes the system as “They haven’t employed regular sanitation workers in more in two decades. “Everything passes via these private agencies.” According to the Delhi government’s e-tendering portal, the DJB advertised 99 open tenders for sewage management and repairs in various locations in March alone.

Nonetheless, even when mechanised solutions are implemented, the reliance on human effort remains. In August 2023, the DJB confirmed that 189 contractors supplying sewer-cleaning devices were in a “serious situation” due to unpaid debts, reducing the scheme’s efficacy. Machines breakdown or prove insufficient, and personnel are ordered into the pits despite their lack of training or safety gear.

This type of denial is not new. The DJB does not view sanitation personnel, particularly those engaged through contractors, as its responsibility: outsourcing sewage cleaning to commercial organizations relieves the board of direct obligation. According to Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch (DASAM) investigations, at least eight sewage worker deaths have occurred in Delhi in the last three to four months. However, the government refuses to accept these fatalities as the result of manual scavenging. This is a failure to recognise the workers as their own, and it avoids the legal and financial duties that come with such acknowledgment.

The Ecosystem of Exploitation: How the System Shields Itself

The abuse begins with deception and ends with death, with hardly anyone accepting responsibility. Consider Suraj Lohar, who was officially employed as a security guard in Delhi but was forced to work as a sewer cleaner. When he died in November 2022, officials refused to term him a sanitation worker in the official documents, making it nearly impossible for his family to obtain justice. This deliberate misnaming—referring to workers as security guards, daily wage laborers, or temporary workers—keeps their deaths off the official count of manual scavenging.

Virpal, a six-year contract laborer for the DJB’s sewer-cleaning machinery in east Delhi, explains the catch that traps these workers: “If something happens to them, the DJB says they don’t work there, and the contractor says go to the DJB. So, they don’t have any identity, any employment papers.” This lack of paperwork is such that when workers are killed, their families have trouble even establishing that their dead loved ones were working sanitation workers, much less getting compensation or justice.

The hiring process is out of sight. Rahmat Ali, who lives in a slum in Ghazipur, paints a system without protection or rules: “There are no forms. Someone comes to the jhuggi, asks us if they want work, tells them what to do, and they go to the site. Sometimes there is no work for days, even months. They look for anything—cleaning drains or dry litter at least, that pays them.” There are no contracts, no safety training, and no protective gear—just verbal promises and lives at stake for daily wages that barely keep families afloat.

Delhi’s sewerage system runs in disconnected segments which lead to shirking of responsibility. Between city corporations, private laborers, and the DJB, responsibility is lost. The DJB says its contract and full-time employees no longer goes into sewers; they work with machines. 

Instead, “the contractors employ local staff, who have no experience of this type of work, to enter the sewers. Because they are employed unofficially by the contractors, technically it does not count as involving the DJB.” This spider web outsourcing is a muddled system in which nobody is accountable. When workers are killed, the DJB blames the contractors, and contractors disappear or claim the workers were “negligent”—as if it was a matter of personal choice and not a last resort.

Is Manual Scavenging A Law That Cannot Die?

The unfortunate reality is that manual scavenging was legally prohibited in India by The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. The legislation vowed to end the practice and rehabilitate those trapped in this humiliating occupation. Yet, a decade later, fatalities continue to occur frequently, which indicates either a massive failure to implement the law or deliberate sabotage of what the law sought to achieve.

The Act itself is flawed. It bans unsafe cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, but it does not explicitly ban hand cleaning provided that protective gear is issued—this is a loophole taken advantage of by contractors, and they do not infrequently issue that gear. The law is rendered ineffective, watered down by the people who are supposed to enforce it.

This ambiguous law results in the cruel reality we witness now: a prohibited act that continues to cause fatalities frequently and inevitably. Every fatality is not only an individual tragedy but a system failure—a reflection of the gap between what India wishes to accomplish with its legislation and what is occurring in actuality.

Beyond Death: The Living Hell of Manual Scavenging

“A manual scavenger’s work smelled bad once, but their life stinks forever!” This proverb sums up the irreversible stigma that attaches to those who do this work. The World Health Organisation calls sanitation workers some of the most “invisible, unquantified, neglected and ostracised” individuals in society—a characterization that only marginally touches the surface of their lived experience.

A worker recounts that on several times while he and the colleagues were working, trash and used sanitary pads thrown by tenants of the housing board units fell on them. Consider not only the revulsion of this but also the psychological anguish of being treated like less than human—like you’re simply rubbish bins for other humans’ rubbish.

Another worker describes how people deny even a modicum of dignity: “They will not provide a glass of water or a bucket to fetch water for their bath after work to sanitation workers.” With painful self-awareness, he goes on, “Of course, they will be afraid. We can’t blame them… They must be in fear of getting an infection. Ours is a hazardous job.” This internalized stigma—concurring to accept one’s treatment as being untouchable—is one of the most insidious aspects of this practice.

The same worker clearly says, “No man should be asked to clear another human being’s excreta for a living.” This straightforward comment captures the essence of the ethical problem. In a world that professes to hold equality and human dignity as its values, how can we reasonably expect our fellow citizens to go into sewers to clean our dirt?

Consider how you would feel if you had something very smelly, such as rotten eggs, on your hands. You would clean your hands constantly, use scented cream, and still feel dirty. Consider having this a thousand times worse and living your entire life smelling of this horrid odor, with no relief, no break, and no one treating you like a human. This is what everyday life is like for those trapped in manual scavenging.

Historical Echoes of Manual Scavenging: A History of Discrimination

Scavenging in India is not simply a recent urban planning or public health failure—it’s a modern expression of a centuries-old caste-based occupation. Previously, people from specific Dalit sub-castes had to clean human feces from dry toilets, an occupation that kept them at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

When Mahatma Gandhi fought against untouchability in the early 20th century, he pointed out the suffering of people he called “bhangis” (a name for manual scavengers). He said that this practice was a shame on Indian civilization. Even after more than a hundred years, this disrespect still exists in a modern way.

The British colonial state did not abolish this system. Instead, they institutionalized it by way of local government arrangements that only sanctioned the prevailing caste-based occupational divisions. India inherited these systems after independence. In spite of law against untouchability and other legal attempts to check it, the practice has survived surprisingly well.

The first law that focused on manual scavenging was made in 1993. It was called the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act. After twenty years of not being properly followed, a new and better law was made in 2013. Every time a new law was created, it was seen as a way to end this cruel practice, but none have kept their promise, as in, who even keep promise? when the citizens, and particularly poor, are nothing more than just vote banks!

This background explains why manual scavenging persists despite legal prohibitions—it’s based on entrenched social hierarchies and power relations resistant to change through bureaucratic inertia, wilful weak enforcement, and exploitation of legal loopholes.

International Comparisons On How To Handle Manual Scavenging.

India’s fight against manual scavenging is not unique to India. Sanitation workers everywhere work under hazardous conditions, but practices employed elsewhere demonstrate what is possible when there is political will.

Japan upgraded its sewage treatment after the war through the utilization of more machinery and stringent labor protection laws. Workers who maintain Japan’s sewage pipes wear special protective suits and operate remote-controlled robots, and fatalities are unheard of.

South Africa has a racial segregation history that has impacted sanitation work, but it has made significant strides in recent years. The country’s “Working on Waste” project combines cleaning the environment with offering respectful job opportunities, with an emphasis on machines and safety protocols.

Even Vietnam, as economically troubled as India, has developed new concepts such as the Vacutug—vacuum tankers on cars that can traverse tight streets to empty septic tanks without anyone entering them.

These from other nations demonstrate that the ongoing issue of manual scavenging in India does not have to exist or be inevitable—it is a recurring choice by those who have the power to alter the system but lack the desire to do so.

Is There An End To This Brutal Cycle of Manual Scavenging?

What do we require to totally eradicate manual scavenging from India? The way is clear, though the job appears Herculean:

It is extremely important to make existing law stick. The template for action is provided in the 2013 Act, but it has failed to be enforced effectively. Government agencies should be held responsible for guaranteeing that no one goes into septic tanks or sewers without proper equipment and training.

Technology must be adopted and maintained. India has all the engineering brains—the same nation that lands satellites on Mars can certainly devise and maintain proper sewage cleaning gear. The DJB’s admission of faulty machinery is not technological deficiency but an indicator of a management failure.

The tender system must be completely reformed. Awarding contracts to the lowest bidder usually compromises the safety of employees. Tenders must include rigid safety regulations, frequent inspections, and substantial fines for violating the rules.

Employee records should be formalized. Invisibility of sanitation workers—their absence of formal employment records—allows them to be exploited. An effective registration system would be a way of safeguarding their rights from abuse.

The rehabilitation programs must be funded and implemented in the right manner. The 2013 Act provides for the assistance of manual scavengers, but they remain mostly on paper and not in action. Training schemes, employment opportunities, and financial assistance are key to breaking the cycle.

We need to alter the mindset of society. As long as we think that sanitation work is shameful, unnecessary, the people who do it will continue to be treated unjustly. In order to pay respect to the work, we must pay respect to the people who do the work first.

The Hard Truth Goes On As India nears its independence centenary in 2047, will we continue counting the bodies pulled out of sewers and enter the new century with the burden of manual scavenging? 

Will civic officials continue playing their game of pointing fingers while families mourn their dead breadwinners? The continuance of manual scavenging in Delhi and India as a whole is an institutional failure—a poisonous mix of bureaucratic denial, economic exploitation, and social insensitivity.

The 2013 Act heralded a new dawn, but its implementation stumbles on weak enforcement and loopholes which are exploited by the powers that be. One of the workers, Jony, captures it best: “There has to be someone who wants to hear our version.” That single sentence captures the crux of the issue—those who are most hurt are not being heard, their stories are dismissed, and their humanity is being denied.

Every time a worker goes down into a sewer without safety gear, every time poisonous gases take another life, and every time a family fights to make ends meet after losing their only breadwinner—India abandon their promise in the constitution to provide dignity to all citizens. The question is: how many more lives have to be lost before we put an end to this long-standing shame of manual scavenging?