India’s Women Manual Scavengers Caught Between Illegal Exploitation and Desperation

“They would not touch us.”

Santoshi, 45, described that, when she’d be paid for her work — a labor-intensive, caste-sanctioned profession known as “manual scavenging” — her remuneration was often thrown at her instead of handed to her because her employers, private contractors, didn’t want to make any physical contact with her.

Sanitation work in India still involves illegal manual labor, with neither operational nor safety equipment. Like Santoshi, Indians who belong to certain caste groups — such as the Doms, Valmikis (Santoshi’s community), and Basfors, which are some of the most marginalized castes in the country and already victims of rampant “untouchability” — are employed under the table as “manual scavengers,” manually cleaning sewers and "dry" toilets (toilets without a flush) and disposing of human waste.

According to the International Dalit Solidarity Network, an estimated 1.3 million Dalits — mostly women — are employed as manual scavengers, loading waste onto baskets or metal troughs to carry off for disposal. Santoshi has been doing it for the last 25 years. Women like her employed in this work are poor, with little to no formal education, and are recruited as informal workers without fixed wages or consistent payments, leaving them vulnerable to being underpaid — if they manage to get paid at all.

Not only is the work detrimental to their long-term health for a host of reasons — among them, chronic skin diseases, respiratory ailments, rashes, skin rotting, and permanent hair loss, according to Dr. Pallavi Mahajan, who runs a private clinic in New Delhi — but it’s also a cause for inhumane discrimination, which not only affects how they’re treated out in society but also their pursuit of alternative livelihoods.

A 2018 survey conducted across four Indian states by the Association of Rural Urban & Needy (ARUN), the New Delhi-based Center for Equity Studies, and WaterAid India found that several of its women respondents were prohibited from eating with other people and had to use separate glasses and utensils. The majority knew that their work was illegal but expressed being failed by government schemes to rehabilitate them into other work. Some attempted to move away from manual scavenging on their own but were unsuccessful; those who were found work that still involved cleaning toilets.

State governments conduct an annual survey to identify the number of manual scavengers in a particular area; then, they release a list of manual scavengers who are eligible to be “rehabilitated” and undergo training for other skills. But Sagar Kumbhare, a researcher at the Center for Equity Studies (who was involved in preparing the survey), told us that he has not met a single manual scavenger who has been successfully rehabilitated through government programs.

“Nothing reaches them on the ground,” he said.

The Prohibition of Employment of Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 only provides one-time cash compensation of at most ₹40,000 (about $530) — far less than a year’s salary to survive in India, even for a low-income household. For example, the annual income salary for the bottom 50 percent of India’s population stands at approximately ₹53,610 ($720.50).

Saroj, a former manual scavenger in the state of Uttar Pradesh, was identified for rehabilitation by the government’s survey in June 2018, but she claims that she has yet to receive any cash assistance or help. “I thought it would change my life, but nothing happened,” she told us. “I lost my job, and now I am unemployed. Nobody asks me for other work because everybody in nearby villages thinks I am born to do this work.”

“They are made to feel every day that they deserve to do only the inhuman job of manual scavenging,” said Kumbhare. “Why? Because of their caste.”

“We’re talking about communities already facing so much untouchability and discrimination,” said Bhasha Singh, a journalist and activist for sanitation workers’ rights. “How will this token amount of money help them change their situation? If a woman discriminated against as untouchable uses money to open her own business, how many people in this casteist society will buy from her? They want education and government-assured jobs, not a piecemeal loan.”

Of course, Singh notes, the process of rehabilitation can’t be expected to succeed “when the government is in denial” about manual scavengers’ existence in the first place.

By official counts, the number of manual scavengers dropped 728,035 between 2008 and 2018 (from 770,338 in 2008 to 42,303 in 2018), which the national government attributed to strict enforcement of the 2013 act. But a closer examination of these counts quickly reveals a flawed methodology, for example, in which only some of the manual scavengers identified by the Socio-Economic Caste Census were counted by the government arm in charge of the counts. The counts were also confined to only statutory towns, assuming that manual scavenging only happens in urban areas. And for all the government’s touting of strict enforcement, in practice, only very few reports of violations of the law have been recorded since the act was passed nearly a decade ago — and even fewer have led to prosecutions.

In August 2021, Ramdas Athawale, the minister of state for social justice and empowerment, told the lower house of India’s parliament that the state governments have reported that this practice is no longer prevalent in their states. However, Safai Karmachari Andolan (Movement for Sanitation Workers, or SKA) estimates that the number of manual scavengers in India today is around 1.2 million, which aligns with the International Dalit Solidarity Networks figure.

We reached out to the ruling party’s spokesperson, Nalin Kohli, and asked him why there is such a large discrepancy between the number of manual scavengers estimated by the government and by SKA, which he refused to answer.

“Most of the time, the government does not even accept that there are manual scavengers in their state so that they can declare their state free from manual scavenging,” said Kumbhare.

In October 2014, the Indian government launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Campaign to end open defecation and ensure sanitation access across India. One of its goals was to mechanize the cleaning of sewers and open drains. Under the campaign, the government pledged to build toilets using "twin-pit" technology, which would ostensibly remove the direct engagement of a human being with human waste. But according to Bezwada Wilson, SKA’s national convener, about 85 percent of the toilets built under the campaign were not, in fact, twin pit.

“The Central Government’s claim of eradicating manual scavenging through technology is misleading,” added Kumbhare, saying that the majority of toilets built have septic tanks with soak pits and single pits — both of which still require manual scavenging.

“Even if it is a twin pit,” said Wilson in an October 2019 interview, “in Indian climatic conditions, it is not going to work perfectly.”

Kumbhare pointed to a more durable and effective solution: offering manual scavengers skills training and rehabilitating them into other fields. “It not only helps them but the generations to come,” he said. “It breaks the casteist cycle in which generation after generation people are forced to do this job.”