India, June 10 -- Some lives are less equal than others, as we are reminded every day. The deaths of two sanitation workers at a sewage treatment plant in Faridabad on Tuesday highlight one of the country's most enduring and repeated failures. According to police, the men lost consciousness after inhaling poisonous gases while entering a sludge tank and drowned. Just days earlier, another worker died while cleaning a sewer line in Uttar Pradesh. Such is the complacence around this issue that headlines do not seem to affect anyone anymore, only to be replaced by the next avoidable tragedy.

What makes such loss of lives particularly disturbing, apart from apathy, is that they continue despite clear laws prohibiting manual scavenging and ha...