Still Cleaning With Bare Hands

**Suhana Roy 

“Manual scavenging is not a form of employment; it is a human rights violation.”
— Human Rights Watch, 2014 Report

In July 2025, a report tabled in Parliament offered a sobering reminder of the ongoing indignities endured by sanitation workers in India. Of the 150 hazardous cleaning deaths documented across the country in 2022–23, a Ministry of Social Justice audit revealed that in 90 percent of the cases, workers were sent into sewers without any protective equipment. Only five received gloves, and a single worker was provided both gloves and gumboots. These findings, drawn from eight states and union territories, starkly illustrate the fatal cost of institutional negligence and the hollow claims that manual scavenging has been eradicated in India.

What emerges from these revelations is not simply a lapse in governance but a deeper structural contradiction. On paper, India boasts some of the most progressive laws that ban manual scavenging and protect labour dignity. Yet, in practice, deaths in septic tanks and sewers continue unabated. This blog undertakes an analytical examination of this dissonance through the lens of constitutional law, statutory protections, judicial pronouncements, and socio-political failure.

From Constitutional Promise to Legislative Pretence

In India, the main legal tool that bans manual scavenging is the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (PEMSR Act). This law was enacted after decades of activism with the provisions of making it a criminal offence to involve any human in cleaning human excreta manually, particularly in insanitary latrines, open drains, sewers, or septic tanks. The Act also stipulates the provision of protective gear, mechanized equipment, and safety training, and identification, rehabilitation, and provision of alternative livelihoods to the manual scavengers who are already in the system. Sections 5 and 6 under the Section prohibit directly the employment of a worker without any protective equipment or any mechanization. Besides this core law, The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, makes it a punishable offence to force Dalit people, who form the bulk of sanitation workers, to work in this occupation. Thus, manual scavenging is not just illegal, but also legally recognized as a caste-based atrocity.

The constitutional framework further strengthens this mandate. Article 21, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty, has consistently been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include the right to live with dignity. In judgments like Francis Coralie Mullin v. The Administrator, Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. UOI, and Maneka Gandhi v. UOI, the Court has recognized that labour conditions that degrade human dignity are incompatible with Article 21. Additionally, Article 23 prohibits forced labour, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability, a social practice intrinsically linked to the caste-based assignment of this labour.

Together, these provisions envision a legal and moral order where no person should be compelled by poverty, compulsion, or discrimination to engage in work that endangers life and denies basic human dignity.

Constitutional Conscience in the Dock: Has Judicial Activism Gone Far Enough?

The Indian court has, on several occasions, asserted that manual scavenging is inconsistent with the constitutional values. In the case Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India (2014), the Supreme Court stated that manual scavenging was a flagitious infringement of fundamental rights. The Court ordered the Union and State governments to find all the deaths caused by Sewers and Septic tanks since 1993 and compensate the family of the deceased with 10 lakhs of rupees. The rehabilitation measures, such as housing, skill development, and alternative employment, were also decreed by the judgment.

Further development of such judicial activism was in Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (2023), in which the Court revised its compensation to 30 lakh in deaths and 1020 lakh in disabilities caused by hazardous cleaning. It instructed the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) to keep track of the compliance, supervise the compensation release, and regularize mechanisms of safe sanitation work. The centralized web-based portal was also commissioned to monitor all sewer-related fatalities and hold the people accountable.

However, the results of the implementation are not effective as it is fragmented despite these directives. The audit recently conducted shows that most of these guidelines are just in form. Payment is not made or comes late, there are no punitive measures against careless officials and the targets of mechanization are not achieved.

The Audit: Counting Bodies, Evading Blame

The findings from the Ministry of Social Justice’s 2022–23 audit are nothing short of damning. In most cases examined, agencies failed to provide safety equipment, did not use mechanized cleaning tools like suction pumps or robots, and neglected to conduct awareness drives or risk training. In several instances, workers entered sewers without informed consent. Where written consent was obtained, they were not properly informed of the dangers involved—rendering any such consent void under basic principles of contract law.

The audit also revealed that the majority of workers were hired informally through middlemen or subcontractors. This practice shields both government departments and principal employers from legal liability. Few workers were employed directly by municipal bodies or recognized public sector undertakings. These employment patterns violate not only the PEMSR Act but also the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code, 2020, which mandates employer responsibility for the safety of contract workers.

The violations highlighted by the audit illustrate that what persists is not just an outdated practice but an active structure of caste, class, and institutional power that enables and conceals the exploitation of sanitation workers.

Casteed Occupations and Public Health Neglect

Manual scavenging still takes a huge toll on human lives, besides the legal violations. Sanitation workers are exposed to fatal gases like hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane, which may kill them instantly or develop chronic respiratory problems, hepatitis, tetanus, or persistent skin diseases. The majority lack routine medical checkups, insurance, or access to emergency health treatment.

These workers are mostly Dalits, and this shows the relation between caste and occupational risk. It is also this deeply rooted stigma that exposes them to social exclusion, untouchability, and a lack of access to public goods such as education, housing, and healthcare. The association between caste and sewer work has not been broken despite the guarantees of the constitution.

Women workers have the greater burden. They are usually involved in cleaning up dry latrines or going door to door to collect garbage, and their wages are lower; they do not have proper sanitary facilities at working workplaces, and they are usually sexually harassed. They work gendered and invisible labour and are therefore doubly exploited in the sanitation economy.

Policy Optics: Deconstructing the Smart Sanitation Narrative

On their part, the government has introduced several programs in recent years that have been geared towards mechanization and the welfare of workers. The NAMASTE scheme (National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem) targets sanitation workers, helping them transition to secure and mechanized work. It also guarantees skill training, health coverage, and financial inclusion.

Innovation in technology has been implemented too. Robots such as Bandicoot robot, vacuum jetting trucks, and pipeline inspection machines like Endobot and Swasth AI are created to reduce the contact of the human being with waste. The urban local bodies are given money by the Swachh Bharat Mission to buy these technologies and the PM-DAKSH trains workers on how to operate machines and other skilled jobs.

Nevertheless, although these interventions promise to be implemented, there is uneven implementation. Audit showed that over 85 per cent of the deaths recorded were not caused by mechanized tools. Metropolitan cities are usually the best equipped with the new technologies, whereas smaller cities do not have the money and political desire to use them.

Making Dignity Non-Negotiable: Legal Pathways to Just Sanitation Work

Manual scavenging can only be ended through actual abolition and not just symbolic abolition, which needs to comprise strong enforcement, legal responsibility, and structural change. The death in sewers should be dealt with as culpable homicide under the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita and not as a regrettable accident. Violations against the PEMSR Act should be meted out to the employers, whether in the government or in the private sector, by prosecution and not by mere fine or warning.

The state should also make sure that all the urban local bodies should have enough machines and trained manpower to make 100 percent mechanization. Entry into sewers by human beings must be allowed in extreme and unavoidable emergencies only and this must be done under full protection gear and back up facilities.

Rehabilitation should no longer be token. The ex-manual scavengers should be guaranteed lifelong jobs, economic stability, and a healthcare facility. Intergenerational mobility and dignity can be achieved by including them in the work programs in urban areas in MGNREGA, offering pensions to them, and reserving jobs for their children.

Last but not least, there should be a judicially supervised, real-time, publicly accessible database of sanitation workers, deaths, equipment utilization, and compensation. NALSA and state human rights commissions must be authorized to enable them to independently monitor and institute proceedings in case of non-compliance.

Conclusion: The Cost of Silence is Measured in Lives

The continued existence of manual scavenging and unsafe sewer cleaning in India is not a legal anomaly but a moral and constitutional crisis. It signals a failure of political will, administrative resolve, and social conscience. The deaths of workers in sewers, often unnamed and unnoticed, are a tragic testament to the persistence of caste-based inequality and labour exploitation under the guise of urban sanitation.

India’s legal architecture has already condemned this practice; the Constitution has outlawed its moral foundation. What remains is for society and the State to act—not with pity, but with justice. The lives of those who clean our waste cannot be treated as disposable. Their dignity, rights, and safety are not negotiable.

Anything less is a betrayal not just of the law, but of the promise of equality and human dignity that our democracy was built to uphold.

**Suhana Roy is a third-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of constitutional law, criminal law, labour rights, and social justice. She is particularly drawn to questions of structural inequality, the role of law in enabling dignity for marginalised communities, and the lived realities of state apathy. Suhana has previously written on themes such as environmental constitutionalism, gendered labour, and digital inheritance.  

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.