India

India Faces Ongoing Sanitation Worker Fatalities Amid Legislative and Technological Measures

By The Hindu

India continues to lose sanitation workers to preventable deaths despite legislation, Supreme Court orders, government programmes, mechanised cleaning technologies, and political exhortations. In a recent incident, four workers died in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, while cleaning a hotel’s food‑waste chamber. According to Parliament and the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, 859 workers died on sewer and septic‑tank jobs between 2014 and 2025, 498 deaths occurred from 2019 to mid‑2026, 332 deaths were recorded across 18 states and union territories in 2021‑26, and 1,350 deaths have been reported between 1993 and 2025. The figures have never approached zero, even as the Safai Karamchari Andolan has repeatedly alleged severe under‑reporting. The government has maintained since at least 2021 that manual cleaning of excreta from insanitary latrines has been eliminated, implying that it believes the root problem has been addressed and relieving administrative bodies of the urgency to inspect municipalities and private establishments. Members of historically marginalised castes are overrepresented in these jobs. The law has distinguished hazardous sewer and septic‑tank cleaning from manual scavenging since 2013, yet persons entering them remain vulnerable to noxious gases. In Dr. Balram Singh (2023), the Court strengthened the requirements under Safai Karamchari Andolan (2014) to, among other measures, ensure outsourced sewer‑cleaning contracts did not entail workers entering sewers and raised the compensation for deaths to ₹30 lakh per worker. In 2025, an order was issued to end manual sewer cleaning in four metropolitan cities, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, followed a year later by notices to 15 Chief Secretaries for disobeying the 2023 order, including on compensation. Private contractors and municipal bodies are known to violate the restrictions on manual cleaning specified in the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 and Rules, and evade liability by hiring undocumented daily‑wage workers. The scourge of such worker deaths cannot be eliminated without also formalising their employment and improving social security across caste lines. A significant gap between aims and outcomes has also persisted under the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem scheme. While it is centred on urban local bodies, its difficulties highlight the state’s fundamental error: to maximise administrative assistance, such as by distributing kits, rather than minimising the number of situations that could lead to worker deaths.