Danger in the sewer: On India’s sewer cleaning deaths

Despite legislation, Supreme Court orders, government programmes, the availability of mechanised cleaning technologies, and exhortations from politicians, India continues to lose sanitation workers to foreseeable, and largely preventable, circumstances.

In a recent incident, four workers lost their lives in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, cleaning a hotel’s food-waste chamber. According to Parliament and the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis data, the number of workers who died on jobs involving sewer and septic tanks was 859 between 2014 and 2025, 498 from 2019 to mid-2026, 332 across 18 States and Union Territories in 2021-26, and 1,350 between 1993 and 2025.

The figures have never tended towards zero even as the Safai Karamchari Andolan has repeatedly alleged severe under-reporting. Further, the government has maintained since at least 2021 that the practice of manually cleaning excreta from insanitary latrines has been eliminated, effectively signalling that it believes it has addressed the root of the problem when it has not, and freeing administrative bodies of the urgency of inspecting municipalities and private establishments.

Members of historically marginalised castes are also overrepresented in these jobs. The law has distinguished hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks from manual scavenging since 2013. Even so, persons entering them are still vulnerable to noxious gases.

In Dr. Balram Singh (2023), the Court strengthened the requirements under Safai Karamchari Andolan (2014) to, among other measures, ensure outsourced sewer-cleaning contracts did not entail workers entering sewers and raise the compensation for deaths to ₹30 lakh per worker.

In 2025, there was an order to end manual sewer cleaning in four metropolitan cities, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad followed a year later with notices to 15 Chief Secretaries for disobeying the 2023 order, including on the compensation.

Private contractors and municipal bodies are known to violate the restrictions on manual cleaning specified in the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 and Rules, and evade liability by hiring undocumented daily-wage workers.

The scourge of such worker deaths thus cannot be eliminated without also formalising their employment and improving social security across caste lines. A significant gap between aims and outcomes has also persisted under the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem scheme.

And while it is centred on urban local bodies, its difficulties speak to the state’s fundamental error: to maximise administrative assistance, such as by distributing kits, rather than minimising the number of situations that could lead to worker deaths.