In their recent investigation on sewer deaths, The Indian Express reported that over the past 15 years, 94 people have died while cleaning sewers in Delhi. In the last seven months itself, around 10 workers have lost their lives while cleaning sewer and septic tanks in Delhi-NCR. These cases must push us to ask some critical questions: What factors undermine the safety and security of sewage and sanitation workers? How do accountability gaps get created in the system? How, despite laws prohibiting “hazardous cleaning” of sewers, the practice continues unabated with impunity? Why do sanitation workers struggle to live a life of dignity in a country that recently celebrated a decade of the Swachh Bharat Mission?
This article examines how contractualisation and deregulation of sanitation work, along with deep-seated societal apathy, impacts sewage and sanitation workers. I draw my reflections from my ongoing research on sewage infrastructures, alongside fact-finding on sewer and septic tank deaths in Delhi (that we conducted as part of a team of researchers and activists organised by Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch, DASAM).
Over the years, there has been rising contractualisation in sanitation work. Urban civic bodies now increasingly rely on private contractors for various projects and workforce requirements. This phenomenon, that must be seen in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, particularly affects the contractual sanitation worker.
Despite working in toxic waste environments, they struggle for basic minimum wages, adequate safety equipment, and social security provisions. Research has indicated that women sanitation workers face additional health and safety risks stemming from the absence of basic facilities at worksites (such as well-lit toilets, resting sheds, mobile charging points) and lack of maternity leave and other leave benefits. These challenges, coupled with job precarity and a lack of employer accountability, make the sanitation worker more vulnerable.
Alongside the rising contractualisation of sanitation work within civic bodies, there is also an emergence of private agencies offering sanitation services where state regulation is further diluted or absent. In sewage work, for instance, there have emerged private services for septic tank cleaning, especially in parts of the city with inadequate or no sewer connection. A large number of urban houses are not connected to the sewer system and a majority of them use toilets connected to septic tanks that demand periodic cleaning. Septic tank cleaning services, such as private vacuum tankers, thus, emerge as a critical market. However, while they may appear to fill in the gaps left by urban sewerage planning, many times the labour hired for these services is untrained and rarely provided with safety equipment. This puts the workers’ lives in grave danger. In May 2024, two men died while cleaning a septic tank in Delhi’s Old Jasola village. The men succumbed to the poisonous gases, when despite two rounds of cleaning with the desludging vehicle, a tractor tank, they were allegedly forced to enter the septic tank to ensure the cleaning of the remaining sludge.
It must be noted that such instances of “hazardous cleaning” of sewers and septic tanks — a practice legally prohibited under The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (MS Act) — also occur in sewered and high-end complexes. In May 2024 again, two workers lost their lives after they were forced to enter a clogged sewer, without any protective equipment or supervision, at a mall in Rohini. The workers were contractually employed as housekeeping staff by a private company to which the mall had outsourced cleaning and maintenance operations. In the same month, two daily wage workers lost their lives while cleaning the private septic chamber of a house in one of Noida’s prominent colonies. These cases show how commercial complexes and housing colonies, instead of contacting the designated civic bodies, often summon untrained workers to clean sewer and septic tanks and that too without accounting for the safety risks in sewage work. The absence of regulation in privately contracted sanitation work, exploitative work arrangements, and negligence combine to take lives down the drain.
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Such negligence and apathy, cutting across state, market and civil society, also point to how caste and ideas of caste pollution implicitly shape civic attitudes. These include the normalised expectation that this work, often called “ganda kaam,” (dirty work) will be done by “somebody else”, most often those placed in the lowest grade in the caste hierarchy and expected to deal with “polluting” substances. Consider the range of waste items sewer workers encounter in unclogging the blocked lines (including areas where machines can’t reach) – discarded clothes, sanitary napkins, plastic objects, glass bottles, blades, used needles, etc. Extrapolating from Indian political scientist Valerian Rodrigues’s analysis of filth, caste, and public space in India, it can be argued that this slack disregard towards what one throws down the drain is not just apathy, but a neglect of “polluted” spaces that “can be left to fester until someone of the right caste comes by to clean up”.
A critical evaluation of these interlinkages between contractualisation and deregulation of sanitation work, urbanisation, and caste is urgently needed. The cases of sewer and septic tank deaths call for an immediate attention to the various systemic gaps: Accountability lapses due to contractualisation, inadequate regulation of privately contracted sewage work, weak enforcement and awareness of the MS Act, and inadequate sewerage planning amidst rapid urbanisation.
The writer is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto