Inequalities Of Caste And Contract In Sewage Work In Delhi-NCR
The Swachh Bharat Mission movement has seldom grappled with questions of work, labour, contract and caste (Photo by Susmita Saha on Unsplash)
In October 2024, Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), India’s largest sanitation project to make the country ‘open defecation-free’, turned ten. The project constructed over a hundred million toilets and launched behavioural change initiatives encouraging toilet use and hygiene practices to promote ‘cleanliness’.
In response to the increasing load on sewerage systems due to rising urban density, SBM’s urban component, SBM-U 2.0, focuses on improving sewage management and developing sewage treatment plants to create a sustainable and comprehensive urban sanitation system.
However, these interventions neglect the issues of sewage workers, who constitute the backbone of urban sewage infrastructure. This is seen in the rising contractualisation in sanitation work—outsourcing to private entities or third-party agencies, often with exploitative conditions for workers—that draws upon and reproduces historical inequalities of caste and class in urban India.
This piece draws upon the author’s doctoral research on sewage work and infrastructure in Delhi, alongside fact-finding surveys on sewer and septic tank deaths in 2024, conducted as part of a team of researchers and activists organised by Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch, a social and advocacy forum for sewer workers’ rights in the city.
It addresses two forms of contractualisation: privately contracting sewage work to informal workers or casual labourers, and the rising contractualisation in civic bodies that compounds caste inequality for sewer workers mostly belonging to marginalised caste communities.
Privately contracted sewage work
Despite massive investments in SBM, over the last decade, at least 453 people have died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks in India; other data suggests around 377 deaths between 2019 and 2023, and over 72 deaths between 2013 and 2024 in Delhi alone.
In May 2024, two informal sanitation workers died after allegedly inhaling poisonous fumes while cleaning the private septic chamber of a house in a well-sewered colony in Noida. Two more lost their lives after being forced to enter a clogged sewer without protective equipment or supervision at a mall in northwest Delhi. They were contractually employed as housekeeping staff by a private company to which the mall had outsourced cleaning and maintenance operations.
In October 2024, three labourers died while cleaning a sewer at a construction site in southwest Delhi, leading to investigations on the role of the private construction company and the site owner, a public sector undertaking company. In the last five months, there have been at least three more incidents of sewer and septic tank deaths in Delhi.
The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, prohibits ‘hazardous cleaning’ of sewers, septic tanks or manual cleaning without mandated protective gear, cleaning devices and safety precautions. These cases persist despite the law, pointing to the absence of municipal regulation and accountability in privately contracted sewage work and exploitative work arrangements that may force workers to undertake hazardous cleaning without requisite training, supervision and protective gear.
They also reveal a culture of negligence as housing colonies, private companies and state corporations summon untrained informal workers to clean sewers or septic tanks without accounting for safety risks. As gathered from fact-finding surveys, at times, there is an institutional reluctance in criminalising these cases under the Act; they are often seen as ‘accidental’.
Many of these workers were either poor migrant or informal workers, who mostly belonged to marginalised caste or class communities. Many worked as daily-wage labourers, guards or housekeeping staff, and had to take up a range of sewage work without prior experience due to desperate economic circumstances or fear of losing their jobs.
Privately contracted sewage work, thus, draws upon pre-existing social and economic inequalities and vulnerabilities. It also reproduces the cycle of inequality for the workers’ families that are forced to deal with the loss of their loved one, also an earning member, and settle for less than the mandated compensation offered stealthily by contractors, due to lack of resources to fight a legal battle.
To counteract this exploitation and lack of regulation, few ground activists suggested during field discussions that sewage work be undertaken by the civic body as civic body workers and their supervisors are more experienced and the civic body can be held accountable for any lapses or malpractices.
Contractualisation in civic bodies
Sewer workers employed with civic bodies, such as the Delhi Jal Board—the nodal state agency responsible for water and sewerage in the city—emphasise this work is not only dangerous but also demands a certain technique. Skills are accrued through knowledge passed down from senior to junior workers, at times their only safeguard against the risks of sewer work, especially in earlier years, when workers had to enter deep sewers.
The impact of the 2013 Act started emerging a few years after its implementation when new machines for sewer cleaning, though still inadequate, were introduced. The machines, alongside the pressure on civic bodies to ensure compliance with the law, significantly reduced sewer deaths in the civic body. But just as one critical fight for workers’ safety and dignity was being fought, there emerged a new challenge: of contractualisation.
Today, a large number of sewer workers are employed on a contractual basis with civic bodies. In recent years, workers have protested this due to issues such as unfair salary cuts by the contractor, no identity cards and lack of access to social security provisions such as health insurance. Further, once a contract ends, there is a constant fear of losing their source of livelihood. The civic body and contractors pass the buck, revealing accountability gaps in the system.
The contractual system, key to the social infrastructure of urban sanitation today, sustains labour inequalities and creates precarity. Further, it exacerbates and compounds the inequality of caste.
Historically, sanitation work in India, seen as ‘polluting work’, has been relegated to marginalised caste communities, particularly the Valmikis and other Dalit sub-castes. Even today, most sewer workers belong to these communities, showing how caste ideologies and practices continue to shape occupational structures. Caste also operates through a deep-seated public apathy towards what goes down the drain with the expectation that someone will do the ‘dirty work’ of unclogging blocked sewer lines. While ‘behavioural change’ is SBM’s key focus area, it rarely targets the casteist foundations of civil society.
Permanent employment in the civic body cannot alone dismantle these structures of caste inequality. However, it offered some safety net: job security, fixed salary and allowances, retirement benefits and health insurance. Contractualisation not only deepens the workers’ economic vulnerability but also reinforces the social marginalisation rooted in caste.
The SBM movement has seldom grappled with questions of work, labour, contract and caste. A focus on them not only reveals how relations of caste and contract sustain urban infrastructures but also the gaps in sanitation programmes and the need for interventions that guarantee safety, security and dignity to the sanitation workforce.
(Published under Creative Commons from 360info™. Read the original article here)
