New Delhi, Sept. 13 -- It is a job nobody should have. Imagine climbing down into a sewer. There is no sunlight. And barely any room. The air is foul, heavy and poisonous. You have a shovel, a bucket and a few rudimentary tools. You are wearing whatever protection is available, if at all. Around you is everything a city has flushed away, discarded and forgotten. You are expected to clean it. Not with a machine operated from a safe distance. Not with a robot. Not with a sophisticated piece of equipment designed to keep a human being out of harm's way. You. Only you.
For hours, you work in an environment into which nobody should put a hand, leave alone a body. You breathe air that no human being should have to breathe. When the work is over, you climb into the sunlight and go home with your meagre earnings. Sometimes, you do not go back at all. The image is despicable, because it is not a scene from India's past. It is not a description of a primitive sanitation system that disappeared with the arrival of today's cities. It is happening in India now.
In July, Parliament was informed that 332 sanitation workers died across the country between January 2021 and June 2026 while undertaking hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. In all, 193 FIRs had been registered against agencies and officials for hazardous manual cleaning. 332 people. Not a statistic. For it involves 332 families whose lives changed because somebody had to enter a place that any modern civilisation should have made inaccessible to human beings.
Official Paradox
There is a paradox in the official story. In August, the Rajya Sabha was told that a fresh nationwide survey had identified no manual scavengers. It also said that 89,915 sewer and septic-tank workers had been validated under the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem, or NAMASTE. Technically, there is a distinction. Under a law passed in 2013, manual scavenging refers to manually cleaning and carrying human excreta from insanitary latrines and other places. Hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks is separately prohibited under the same legal framework.
But for the family of a worker who dies after entering a sewer, the distinction must seem almost surreal. He did not die because a dictionary definition was inadequate. He died because a human being was sent into a place where a machine should have gone. That is the failure we should be discussing.
A Job We Outgrew
India has changed dramatically in the past few decades. We have built metros and expressways. We have put spacecraft on the Moon. We have created the world's largest digital-payment ecosystem. We speak of artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, electric vehicles and becoming a developed economy. We have become very good at eliminating inconvenience for the consumer.
Yet, somewhere behind the apartment towers and shopping malls, behind the smart cities and digital dashboards, there remains a person with a shovel being asked to clean what the rest of us have flushed away. This is not merely a sanitation problem. It is a technological failure. It is an administrative failure. It is an enforcement failure. And ultimately, it is a failure of imagination.
For the solution is not mysterious. The rest of the world has long understood that hazardous sanitation work must be mechanised. India understands it too. NAMASTE is designed around mechanisation and the elimination of hazardous manual cleaning. By 2025-end, 89,000 sewer and septic-tank workers had been validated under the scheme. Then why, after all these years, does a human body remain part of the equipment?
The Caste We Ignore
There is another truth. An uncomfortable one. Manual scavenging has never been only about sewage. It has also been about caste. For generations, some of India's most degrading sanitation tasks have been pushed towards communities at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Much of the work became hereditary. Not because it was dignified or desirable, but because society decided that someone else should do it. And that history cannot be wished away by changing the terminology.
The law has been around for years. The 'Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act' was passed in 2013. It bans the employment or engagement of manual scavengers and provides penalties for violations. In 2023, the Supreme Court stepped in, raising the compensation for sewer deaths to Rs 30 lakh and ordered that sewer cleaning be completely eradicated.
Yet, the deaths continue. That, perhaps, is the damning part. India does not lack laws against this work. It lacks the ability and the administrative will to ensure that the law reaches the bottom of the drain.
Ask Who Cleans It
On September 1, at the Press Club of India, Delhi, sanitation workers and their families from four states gathered under the banner 'India at 80: End Manual Scavenging', insisting that the practice has not disappeared. They were there not as statistics but as people, carrying stories of a 'job role' that the country would rather believe has already ended.
That is worth pausing over. India will soon be 80 years old as an independent nation. Eighty years. And there are still people whose occupation involves dealing manually with the most basic waste produced by human existence. So, what are we celebrating when we talk about India's transformation?
A $4-trillion economy is an impressive economic milestone. But GDP cannot measure dignity. A new highway cannot tell us whether the worker cleaning the drain beneath it is safe. A digital-payment record cannot tell us whether the person who cleaned the sewage system has gloves, protective equipment or a machine to do the job. Development is not simply about what a country can build. It is also about what it refuses to make a human being do.
There is another reason this subject makes us uncomfortable. Most of us do not see the sanitation worker. We flush the toilet and the waste disappears. We close the bathroom door. The smell goes away. The drain clears. You and the city carry on. Somebody else deals with what we have produced. That distance has allowed an extraordinary moral arrangement to survive: one person can enjoy sanitation because another person is prepared to enter its most dangerous underside.
No Excuse Left
There is no argument left for this. Not in a country that has the engineering capability to automate factories, perform robotic surgery, build sophisticated spacecraft and deploy machines into places where humans cannot safely go. Sewer cleaning is not beyond India's technological capacity. It is beyond India's tolerance that it should still require a human body.
The Government has begun mechanisation under NAMASTE, including profiling workers, distributing protective equipment and promoting sanitation enterprises. PPE kits have also been distributed. But protective equipment should never become an excuse for sending people into spaces that machines can clean. The objective cannot be to make manual cleaning safer. It must be to make it unnecessary.
What India needs is a national deadline for eliminating hazardous human entry into sewers and septic tanks; mandate mechanised cleaning wherever feasible; make municipalities and contractors liable for violations; ensure that every worker and family receives compensation and rehabilitation where deaths occur; and publish transparent, state-wise data on every sewer-related fatality. There should be no ambiguity, no escape route and no distinction between the sanitation worker who entered a sewer and the official who authorised it.
The machine should go down. The human being should not. Because the real measure of a developed country is not how high it can fly. It is how low it is willing to look. And whether, when it looks down, it sees a machine doing a job that once demanded a human life. India has spent 80 years trying to become modern. It is time we finally modernised the drain.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.