December 5, 2024 13:00 IST
First published: December 5, 2024 at 12:58 IST
In a recent investigation into sewage deaths, The Indian Express reported that 94 people have died cleaning sewage in Delhi in the past 15 years. In the last seven months, around 10 workers have lost their lives while cleaning sewage and septic tanks in Delhi-NCR. These cases should push us to ask some critical questions: What factors undermine the safety and security of sanitation workers? How are accountability gaps created in the system? How does this practice continue with impunity despite laws prohibiting “hazardous cleaning” of sewage? Why do sanitation workers struggle to live a dignified life in a country that recently celebrated a decade of the Swachh Bharat Mission?
This article examines how the contractualization and deregulation of sanitation leads to deep social disenchantment as well as impacts on sanitation and sanitation workers. I have drawn my reflections from ongoing research on sewage infrastructure, along with fact-finding on deaths from sewage and septic tanks in Delhi (which we conducted as part of a team of researchers and activists organized by Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch, Dasham).
Over the years, the contracting out of cleaning work has been increasing. Urban civic bodies now depend on private contractors for various projects and workforce requirements. This phenomenon, which must be seen in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, particularly affects indentured sanitation workers.
They struggle for a basic minimum wage, adequate safety equipment and social security, despite working in toxic waste environments. Research has indicated that female sanitation workers face additional health and safety risks due to lack of basic facilities at workplaces (such as lighted toilets, rest sheds, mobile charging points) and lack of maternity leave and other leave facilities. These challenges, job ambiguity and lack of employer accountability make sanitation workers more vulnerable.
Along with the increasing contracting out of sanitation work to civic agencies, there has also been the emergence of private agencies providing sanitation services as state regulations become more lax or absent. In sewerage work, for example, private services for cleaning septic tanks have emerged, especially in parts of the city with inadequate or no sewerage. A large number of urban houses are not connected to the sewerage system and most of them use toilets connected to septic tanks that demand periodic cleaning. Septic tank cleaning services, such as private vacuum tankers, thus, emerge as a significant market. Although they seem to fill the gaps left by the urban sewerage scheme, many times the workers employed for these services are untrained and safety equipment is rarely provided. This has seriously threatened the lives of workers. In May 2024, two people died while cleaning a septic tank in Delhi’s old Jasola village. The man died from the toxic gas when the desludging vehicle, a tractor-powered tank, was reportedly forced into a septic tank to clear the remaining waste despite two rounds of cleaning.
It should be noted that instances of “hazardous cleaning” of sewers and septic tanks – a practice legally prohibited under the Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (MS Act) – also occur in sewers and high-end complexes. . Again in May 2024, two laborers lost their lives at a mall in Rohini after they were forced to enter a flooded drain without any protective equipment or supervision. The mall outsourced cleaning and maintenance work to a private company, employing workers as contracted housekeeping staff. In the same month, two daily wage laborers lost their lives while cleaning a private septic chamber of a house in one of Noida’s prominent colonies. These incidents show how commercial complexes and housing colonies call untrained workers to clean sewers and septic tanks instead of contacting the designated civic body and that too without considering the safety risks involved in sewage disposal. Lack of regulation, exploitative work arrangements and negligence in privately contracted sanitation work lead to death in the drain.
Such carelessness and indifference, cutting off the state, the market and civil society, also indicate the shape of the ethnic and ideas of the ethnic pollution of the civil attitude. This includes a generalized expectation that “someone else” will do this work, often called “dirty work,” often placed at the bottom of the caste hierarchy and expected to deal with “polluting” substances. . Consider the range of waste materials that sewer workers encounter when unblocking blocked lines (including areas where machines cannot reach) – discarded clothing, sanitary napkins, plastic items, glass bottles, blades, used needles, etc. In Rodrigues’ analysis of dirt, caste and public space in India, it can be argued that this slow neglect is not simply apathy, but a neglect of “polluted” spaces that “can be left to drain until someone of the right caste comes along to clean them up”.
A critical assessment of these interrelationships between sanitation work, urbanization and the contracting and deregulation of caste is urgently needed. Cases of sewer and septic tank deaths call for urgent attention to various systemic gaps: contractualization, inadequate regulation of privately contracted sewerage works, poor implementation and awareness of the MS Act, and inadequate sewerage planning amid rapid urbanization.
The author is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto