"How Contract Labour and Caste Inequality Undermine India’s Sanitation Drive", 30 April 2025

.. Swachh Bharat Mission - SBM-U 2.0, focuses on improving sewage management and developing sewage treatment plants to create a sustainable and comprehensive urban sanitation system. However, these interventions neglect the issues of sewage workers, who constitute the backbone of urban sewage infrastructures. This is seen in the rising contractualisation in sanitation work—outsourcing to private entities or third-party agencies, often with exploitative conditions for workers—that draws upon and reproduces historical inequalities of caste and class in urban India.

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..data suggests around 377 deaths between 2019 and 2023, and over 72 deaths between 2013 and 2024 in Delhi alone. In May 2024, two informal sanitation workers died after allegedly inhaling poisonous fumes while cleaning the private septic chamber of a house in a well-sewered colony in Noida. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, prohibits ‘hazardous cleaning’ of sewers, septic tanks or manual cleaning without mandated protective gear, cleaning devices and safety precautions. These cases persist despite the law, pointing to the absence of municipal regulation and accountability in privately contracted sewage work and exploitative work arrangements that may force workers to undertake hazardous cleaning without requisite training, supervision and protective gear.

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They also reveal a culture of negligence as housing colonies, private companies and state corporations summon untrained informal workers to clean sewers or septic tanks without accounting for safety risks. As gathered from fact-finding surveys, at times, there is an institutional reluctance in criminalising these cases under the Act; they are often seen as ‘accidental’. Many of these workers were either poor migrant or informal workers, who mostly belonged to marginalised caste or class communities. ..Privately contracted sewage work, thus, draws upon pre-existing social and economic inequalities and vulnerabilities.