Manual scavenging is the unfinished sentence of the Republic

Bezwada Wilson, founder of Safai Karmachari Andolan and 2016 Magsaysay laureate, has spent four decades counting deaths in sewers. 'We are killing each other,' he has said, 'one death at a time.' India banned manual scavenging by statute in 1993 and again, more comprehensively, in 2013. Between 2019 and 2023, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment recorded 339 deaths from sewer and septic-tank cleaning operations. Each death is a Dalit body, almost always from Valmiki, Madiga, Hela or related communities, descending without protective equipment into spaces no human being should enter. As long as caste-coded humans descend into sewers to clean the waste of caste-uncoded humans, the Constitution's Article 17, which declares untouchability abolished and its practice an offence, remains an unfinished sentence — a clause whose period the republic has not yet had the courage to type.

The statute trail is long and the failure cumulative. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act 1993 prohibited the construction of dry latrines and the employment of persons to manually clean human excreta. Implementation was negligible. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 (PEMSR) widened the definition to include hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, mandated rehabilitation through cash assistance, scholarships, skills training and alternative employment, and made principal employers liable for deaths. In 2024, the Supreme Court in Dr Balram Singh v Union of India, delivered on 26 January 2024 with subsequent compliance hearings, directed the central government to achieve total elimination of manual scavenging by 2028, mandated mechanisation, increased compensation for fatal accidents to 30 lakh rupees, and ordered state-wise affidavits of compliance.

The implementation gap is structural. The NAMASTE scheme — National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem — launched in 2023 replacing the earlier Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers, allocated 349.7 crore rupees for FY 2023-26. As of mid-2024, only about 38,000 of an estimated 58,000 surveyed sanitation workers had been identified and registered. The rehabilitation cash assistance of 40,000 rupees, even if disbursed promptly, is inadequate for a family to transition out of a hereditary occupation. Of the recorded sewer deaths, 92 per cent of the deceased belonged to Scheduled Caste communities — confirmation that the occupation is not random labour but caste-coded labour. The Safai Karmachari Andolan's parallel survey identifies thousands more excluded from formal counts because of fear or administrative invisibility.

Technology has begun to offer alternatives that respect dignity. The Bandicoot robotic scavenger, developed by Genrobotics in Kerala and deployed first by the Kerala Water Authority in 2018, can clean manholes without human entry. Bandicoot units now operate in 17 states. The Defence Research and Development Organisation's mobile septic-tank robot, demonstrated in 2024, extends the technology. The Indian Sanitation Coalition and the Centre for Policy Research have argued that mechanisation budgets must be coupled with municipal procurement reform — many city corporations still award sanitation contracts to small contractors who employ casual Dalit labour rather than to municipal sanitation units with safety protocols. The Swachh Bharat Mission's success in constructing 11.6 crore household toilets between 2014 and 2024 was a public-health triumph; the equivalent investment in safe sewage treatment infrastructure has lagged. The Central Pollution Control Board's 2024 data records that only 33 per cent of urban sewage is treated. The remaining 67 per cent flows into rivers, drains and septic tanks that someone, eventually, must clean.

The counter-view deserves engagement. Critics argue the issue is not law but enforcement and economics — most fatal incidents involve small private contractors employing casual labour, not formal municipal sanitation workers. Banning manual scavenging on paper, the argument runs, does not eliminate the small-contractor economy that produces the practice. The 2024 Supreme Court directions in Balram Singh explicitly addressed this objection by holding the principal employer — typically the municipal corporation or public-sector undertaking that engaged the contractor — liable for fatalities. The Court further directed that all sewer and septic-tank cleaning be done exclusively through mechanised means with protective equipment and only as an emergency exception. Enforcement remains the gap, but the legal architecture is now unambiguous. Municipal corporations cannot anymore claim that they did not know who was cleaning their sewers; ignorance is no longer a legal defence.

The deeper challenge is cultural. Manual scavenging is sustained by a caste-economy in which certain communities are presumed available for tasks that the broader society refuses. The persistence of the occupation despite legal prohibition measures how deeply the caste-presumption has survived constitutional abolition. The full eradication of the caste-occupation link requires not only enforcement but cultural shift: the recognition that sanitation work, properly mechanised, equipped and compensated, is dignified work that should be performed by trained professionals on regular pay, drawn from the entire population rather than from one stigmatised section of it.

The economics of mechanisation are favourable when accounted honestly. A Bandicoot unit costs approximately 38 lakh rupees and saves multiple human lives across its operational life; the compensation alone for a single sewer death is 30 lakh rupees, plus the ethical cost no number captures. The argument that mechanisation is unaffordable is, on inspection, the argument that human life is cheaper than equipment — a position no public official can defend in court or in the press.

The Swachh Bharat Mission's symbolic image — Prime Minister Narendra Modi sweeping a street with a broom in October 2014 — momentarily disrupted the caste association of sanitation labour. But symbolic disruption is fragile; structural disruption requires mechanisation, formal employment, training infrastructure, social-security cover, occupational health monitoring and dignified compensation. The 2024 NITI Aayog Working Group on Urban Sanitation has identified specific budget reallocations — within existing schemes — that could complete mechanisation across all Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities within five years. The bottleneck is municipal procurement reform and state-level political will, not central financing. The voices of sanitation workers themselves, articulated through Safai Karmachari Andolan and Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, must shape the reform; the 2024 Sanitation Workers' National Convention's charter for full mechanisation, formal municipal employment and scholarship guarantees for workers' children is minimal, not extreme.

B R Ambedkar, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), wrote that 'caste has killed public spirit.' Manual scavenging is the literal weighing of public spirit against caste tradition — and tradition has, so far, won the daily contest in too many cities. The Constitution's Article 17 declared untouchability abolished in 1950. Seventy-five years later, that abolition remains a partial achievement — true in courts, contested in cities. Until no Indian descends into a sewer to clean another's waste with bare hands, the Republic's sentence is open. Closing it is not the work of one ministry, one judgment or one budget cycle. It is the work of the republic taking its own founding promise seriously, in the most undignified corner where dignity is most needed.