India’s manual scavengers: The faceless ghosts who clean our shit

India has approximately 5 million waste workers all cleaning different types of waste, ranging from residential to public waste, coming into daily contact with disease and ailments. Of the various roles they are forced to play, – manual scavenging is perhaps the worst and most dangerous of them all.

Today, the growing urban populace is living in a world where giant skyscrapers rub shoulders with shanties and where the daily pressures on sewage collection are a constant threat to inhabitants’ health and wellbeing. In all this, it is difficult to focus on who is responsible for ensuring that our cities are kept clean and free of garbage. We take it for granted this is the government’s problem and while this is largely true, who does the work? As a lot of this work is manually done are they given the right tools to do their jobs? Most importantly are they considered a part of mainstream society in India? Who are these faceless ghosts?

Under the “Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (MS Act, 2013)” which has come into force with effect from 06.12.2013, the claim of any person of being a manual scavenger is to be verified by the local authority for inclusion in the list of identified manual scavengers to become eligible for rehabilitation as per the provisions of the MS Act, 2013. 

However, the data on sanitation workers available—both numbers and access to benefits—is inconsistent, primarily because a uniform definition of sanitation work is not consistently applied across the country. 

While the government has undertaken various steps to curb inhumane practices and prevent deaths of sanitation workers through policy directives as well as actual on ground implementation such as the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) advisory in July 2019, establishing Emergency Response Sanitation Units (ERSU) in urban areas to ensure manual cleaning of sewer/septic tank only through trained and appropriately equipped sanitation workers, and MOHUA’s Safaimitra Suraksha Challenge in 20-21 to encourage ULBs to focus on social and occupational safety of sanitation workers and the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment and MoHUA’s joint launch of the National Action for Mechanized Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE) for improving the safety of sanitation workers in 500 AMRUT cities in phase-I, there is still very little public recognition of this problem by civic society across all states.