Opinion Express investigation of manual scavenging: The apathy must end

Since 1993, India has had a law to ban manual scavenging. Since 2013, employers are required by law to provide 44 types of protective gear to labourers engaged in cleaning septic tanks and sewers. Yet, according to the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s data, 443 workers died between 2018 and 2023, while undertaking this hazardous task. This, by all accounts, is a conservative estimate. Several independent surveys have talked about the continued reluctance on the part of state governments to admit that the practice prevails under their watch. Unable to provide safety equipment, municipalities live in denial. Employers are rarely held accountable when manual labourers succumb to the perils of their jobs. An investigation by this newspaper has revealed only one conviction for 75 sewer deaths in Delhi in the past 15 years. From the police being unable to trace the culprits to the investigating officers not cooperating with the judiciary or failing to appear before the courts, it reveals the apathy of law-enforcing agencies. That several sewer deaths happened at high-profile locations at the national capital, including prominent malls, hospitals and hotels only shows that the abdication is unabashed and pervasive.

The Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, which came into force in 2013, asks state governments and municipalities to identify workers who clean sewers and provide them with alternative employment options. A year later, the Supreme Court also asked states to abolish manual scavenging and rehabilitate the workers. However, local bodies outsource sewer cleaning to private contractors, who do not maintain proper rolls of manual scavengers. Investigations often come to a dead end because the police cannot find written orders from contractors asking workers to enter sewers. Located at the margins of society, the families of the deceased do not have the resources to fight lengthy legal battles.

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Government initiatives to end manual scavenging have fallen short of their objectives because they do not adequately account for the social conditions that force people to plumb toxic cesspools. Civil society groups have, for long, argued that fixing the problem is difficult without acknowledging that it operates at the intersections of caste, economic inequalities and the deficits of the country’s sewerage networks — most septic tanks are not amenable to new technology and machines are too big to operate in the narrow bylanes of dense urban areas. The failings, as this newspaper’s investigation shows, are at multiple levels. A government that counts the Swachh Bharat Mission among its successes needs to do more for the safety and well-being of the workers at the frontlines of its cleanliness projects.