“MANUAL SCAVENGING, CONTRACTUALISATION AND SEWER DEATHS: REASSESSING LABOUR PROTECTION POLICIES FOR SANITATION WORKERS IN INDIA”

Indian law prohibits the engagement of any person for the hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, and the Supreme Court treats unsafe sanitation work as a violation of dignity and of the guarantee against forced labour. Yet figures placed before Parliament record 498 deaths in sewer and septic-tank cleaning between January 2019 and June 2026. It argues that the central difficulty is the attribution of responsibility. Sanitation work is increasingly outsourced, and the law governing it is split between a prohibition statute, the contract-labour regime of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, and executive schemes. This split allows public authorities to treat worker safety as the contractor’s contractual duty, narrows rehabilitation through the separation of “manual scavenging” from “hazardous cleaning”, and lets compensation displace prosecution. Through Delhi Jal Board, Safai Karamchari Andolan and Balram Singh, the paper shows that the courts already treat the public authority’s safety duty as non-delegable, and recommends that this principle be given statutory form.