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Manual Scavenging in Mumbai: The Systems of

Oppression

Article in Humanity & Society · October 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0160597620964760

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Original Research Article
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Manual Scavenging in ª The Author(s) 2020

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Mumbai: The Systems DOI: 10.1177/0160597620964760
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of Oppression

Sheeva Y. Dubey1 and John W. Murphy2

Abstract
Manual scavenging is widely practiced in densely populated cities and not just villages
in India. The country’s sanitation workers are dying in large numbers due to suf-
focation inside manholes while cleaning sewer waste. This article presents some of
the concerns and conditions of manual scavengers in Mumbai, the most populated
metropolitan city in India. While most studies and reports bring out statistics on the
issue, the point of this study is to enter the worlds of manual scavengers and learn
about their lived experiences and narratives. This is a qualitative exploration done
among multiple communities of manual scavengers all over Mumbai. This article tells
the story of how manual scavengers are exploited by their employers as the gov-
ernment and society look away, avoiding seeing, hearing, or coming in direct contact
with manual scavengers while benefiting from their labor and exploitation. The lived
experiences of manual scavengers in Mumbai illustrate the complementary play of
caste and class in upholding the oppression and continuing the violence directed to
manual scavengers.

Keywords
caste, dialogic approach, India, labor, manual scavenging, sanitation

1
Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
2
Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Sheeva Y. Dubey, Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), 303 Gulmohar B, Poonam Complex, 90
Feet Road, Thakur Complex, Kandivali E., Mumbai 400101, Maharashtra, India.
Email: sheeva.dubey@gmail.com
2 Humanity & Society XX(X)

Personal Reflexive Statements

Sheeva Dubey: The issue of manual scavenging directly relates to the issue of caste
in India. In my work, activism, and personal life, I draw from and incorporate an
Ambedkarite perspective on caste and gender. This study on manual scavenging also
comes from an anticaste position. With a small beginning through this study, my
work on manual scavenging has now grown into activism resulting in different
activities including community outreach, capacity building, and even advocacy.
Currently, we are working on developing a follow-up study on manual scavenging
with the objective of contributing to policy-making on the issue.
John Murphy: Along with my academic work, I began working in community-
based organizations in and around the United States in the 1970s. At that time,
social service programs were operating according to the Community Mental Health
Act, which led to the deinstitutionalization of mental patients. Since then, I have
organized community-based health projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Two ideas support such projects: Local knowledge matters and community members
should control all interventions. I incorporate these principles in all my scholarship,
teaching, and advising as a professor. I got interested in this study on manual
scavenging in India for the same reasons. Specifically, the focus is on community
narratives and calls for democratic changes.
Until recently, all anti-manual scavenging efforts and scholarship centered on
rural India where traditional forms of manual scavenging still exist (Asian Human
Rights Commission [AHRC] 2009; Human Rights Watch 2014; Shahid 2015; B.
Singh 2012; Srivastava 1997; WaterAid India 2009). Government surveys of manual
scavengers, even when conducted in cities, register only those sanitation workers
who clean insanitary toilets, denying knowledge of all other kinds of manual scaven-
ging (Dubey 2018a). Outside of a few studies (Bakshi 2018; Darokar 2018, 2020;
Pradhan and Mittal 2020), little is known about urban forms of manual scavenging
and the lives of those engaged in this practice. This article offers a glimpse into the
practice of manual scavenging in urban India and how the workers involved are
affected.
This study was conducted among manual scavenging communities in Mumbai
Metropolitan Region in early 2018. The idea was to understand their living and
work conditions through their narratives and the knowledge produced in their
lived experiences. We have used a dialogic approach to enter their worlds and
understand the narratives they tell. The manual scavengers of Mumbai provide a
tale of exploitation at the hands of their employers and contractors and help-
lessness these workers experience. Their rights as humans and laborers get
violated frequently, and they are unable to stop this exploitation. Their imme-
diate concerns include job insecurity, informality, insufficient and irregular
income, lack of safety at work, work-related health issues, and lack of health-
care. The article presents these concerns through the narratives of manual sca-
vengers of Mumbai in their own voices.
Dubey and Murphy 3

Last, the article offers a critical perspective on the systems that facilitate the
exploitation of manual scavengers. On the one hand, the caste system serves as a
means to control these workers. Their destiny is almost predetermined by the asso-
ciated customs and deprivation. On the other, social solidarity is weakened by
neoliberalism since any obligations employers may have to their employees are
practically eliminated. The caste system and neoliberalism, in other words, seem
to work in tandem to restrict the options of manual scavengers.

Manual Scavenging in Urban India

Traditionally, manual scavenging was carried out to clean dry or insanitary latrines,
that is, those that lack water for flushing. Such manual scavenging, mostly practiced
in rural areas, is still operative in a few inland parts of India. With the nation’s
development, manual scavenging has also developed into multiple forms today. A
recent study claims that there are currently nine different forms of manual scaven-
ging in India (Bakshi 2018). Most common practices of urban manual scavenging
include cleaning sewer lines manually. A 2014 government report suggested that
about “770,000 people either work as sewage cleaners or are supported by them”
(Parth 2014: para. 9). In the absence of sewer lines, septic tanks are used to decom-
pose human waste and are also cleaned manually. As per the 2011 Census of India,
38 percent of urban households rely on septic tanks for waste disposal (Dasgupta
2016). Additionally, many households release their sewer waste directly into open
drains that are also cleaned manually (Human Rights Watch 2014). In the absence of
any sanitation facility, people resort to open defecation, another practice that needs
manual scavenging (Counterview 2014). Reports suggest that urban manual scaven-
ging is practiced in other low-income countries as well (Reini 2019). Regardless of
the various forms, avenues, conditions, and experiences of manual scavenging, the
practice remains a gross violation of human rights. Pradhan and Mittal (2020) high-
light the need to explore technological alternatives.
Usually, urban manual scavenging that includes cleaning septic tanks, sewer
lines, and open drains is a man’s job since it is physically demanding and requires
them to step into wet waste (B. Singh 2012). Most workers enter wet waste without
anything on their bodies except underwear and often get injured by sharp objects,
broken glass, and insect bites. Such manual cleaning is also fatal; the poisonous
gases from the decomposing human waste can result in asphyxiation of workers and
their sudden deaths (Ali 2017; S. Singh 2017; Venkat, Tadepalli, and Manuel 2017).
In each death case, usually more than one manual scavenger dies while they try to
save one another (Nair 2018). According to Safai Karmachari Andolan, a nonprofit
organization striving to end manual scavenging, 1,760 sewer deaths happened in
India between 2000 and 2018 (Mishra 2018a). By mid-2019, another 50 workers
died doing this work in just eight states of the country (Sengar 2019).
Even though manual sewage cleaning is killing a large number of workers, the
issue remains underresearched (Venkat et al. 2017). Manual scavengers in India
4 Humanity & Society XX(X)

have increased in the last few decades and were estimated to be more than 1.2
million in 2006 (Pathak 2015; Shahid 2015). This number refers to those manual
scavengers who clean dry toilets and does not include those cleaning sewages. In
contrast, the government survey in 2018 found merely 53,236 manual scavengers
(The Wire 2018). Activists have claimed that these government figures are highly
underreported (Mishra 2018b; Roy 2018). As a WaterAid India (2009) report states,
“manual scavengers have an absurd existence. Officially, they don’t exist but in
reality, they do” (p. 5).
The health issues that manual scavengers often face include respiratory diseases,
parasitic infection, fever, nausea, anemia, allergies, skin ailments, hair loss, menin-
gitis, dysentery, diarrhea, gastrointestinal disorders, jaundice, trachoma, typhoid,
cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, cardiovascular problems, and musculoskeletal disor-
ders (Goswami 2018; Mander 2014; Pradhan and Mittal 2020; Shahid 2015; Water-
Aid India 2009). The infections that manual scavengers are prone to include hepatitis
A, E. coli, leptospirosis, Helicobacter pylori, rotavirus, norovirus, and pinworms
(Goswami 2018; Pradhan and Mittal 2020). Their average life span (50 years) is
significantly shorter than the average (68 years) in India (Counterview 2014; Mitra-
Jha 2016).
Additionally, there is hardly any compensation offered for workers’ injuries and
deaths by the government or the contractors hired to get the job done (Ali 2017). Of
the 1,327 deaths of manual scavengers in sewage and septic tanks, which Safai
Karmachari Andolan documented through 2017, only 25 families received the com-
pensation promised by the Indian government (S. Singh 2017). Rashtriya Garima
Abhiyan also found in their recent study that the government pays the promised
compensation in less than one third of sewer death cases (Nair 2018). Some of the
family members of victims are also “forced to go in for a compromise or threatened
to keep silent” and do not file a police complaint (Nair 2018: para. 3).

Caste and Class: In Theory and Practice

Manual scavenging still exists in India despite this country’s growing development
and advancing technology because this type of work is neither new nor problematic
to the Indian society. Manual scavenging is an “accepted” form of work to be done
by some particular caste communities (Darokar 2020). The caste system, a hierarch-
ical social stratification system, is foundational to Hindu society and is sanctioned by
many of the ancient Hindu texts. Based on the hierarchical caste system, called
chaturvarna in Sanskrit, the traditional Hindu society was divided in four major
social groups, called castes (or varna), that have differential social privileges and
duties (Ambedkar 1936).
In this caste system, a higher caste has more privileges than a lower one, while a
lower caste has duties and obligations to those higher in the hierarchy. While the
highest castes are regarded to be the purest, the lower any person is placed in the
caste hierarchy, the more polluted they are regarded. As a result, the higher castes
Dubey and Murphy 5

enjoy important and rewarding positions related to religion, education, military,

governance, and business. However, for other castes, the lower they are regarded,
the worse their prescribed occupations are in terms of dignity, physical labor, and
rewards.
Over many centuries, the caste system enabled and facilitated tremendous exploi-
tation of the lower castes. The oppressed castes were not allowed to acquire wealth
or the means of production, which was a key aspect of the caste system and its
persistence. Chakravarti (2003) points out that the religious discourse of the caste
system, of purity and pollution, helps ensure “the reproduction of the laboring being
as well as the reproduction of that person’s subordination” (p. 15). As Omvedt
concludes, “caste is a ‘material reality’ with a ‘material base’” that has “historically
shaped the very basis of Indian society and continues to have crucial economic
implications even today” (1982, as cited in Chakravarti 2003:12).
There were, however, additional restrictions on oppressed castes that kept them
from acquiring military resources, political capabilities, and education—the “three
weapons for emancipation”—which makes the caste system so unique and debilitat-
ing (Ambedkar 1936:275). These restrictions were imposed through both cultural
hegemony and violent coercion by the privileged castes. The oppressed castes were
often humiliated, labeled untouchable, and deemed worthy of oppression through a
theory of karma in Hinduism, which claims that sufferings are nothing but punish-
ments for bad deeds in previous lives (Guru 2009). All transgressions of caste rules
were violently punished as prescribed by holy Hindu texts. In Ambedkar’s (1955/
1979) words, the caste system is a “system of graded inequality” with an “ascending
scale of hatred and descending scale of contempt” (p. 167).
Many of the caste communities at the bottom of this hierarchy have been iden-
tified and named by the government as “scheduled castes” (SCs). SC communities
engaged in the anticaste movement have also assertively named themselves Dalits,
which literally means “broken or reduced to pieces” (Mendelsohn and Vicziany
1998:3–4). Different SC communities have been engaged in their caste-prescribed
activities for generations, some later than others (Darokar 2020). Accordingly, they
have been treated as untouchables and forced by the oppressive caste system in
Hinduism to do many demeaning, dirty, dangerous, and physically laborious jobs
(Srivastava 1997).
Although modernization and constitutional means have helped break the rigidity
of the caste system to some extent, Hindus are still employed mostly in caste-based
occupations (Deshpande 2011; Teltumbde 2010). While there are some non-SC
people who engage in manual scavenging, about 95 percent of manual scavengers
are still SC (Mander 2014). SC manual scavenging communities experience the
worst forms of untouchability, extreme violation of their rights, and fare poorer than
others on development indicators (AHRC 2009; Borooah and Iyer 2005; Dubey
2016; Mander 2014; R. Singh and Swain 2014). Their lived realities suggest that
the caste system is still continuing to subject them to oppression, exploitation, and
dehumanization.
6 Humanity & Society XX(X)

The subjection of SC communities is further facilitated by the increasing priva-

tization and contractualization in the country. This juncture is where neoliberalism
contributes to the impoverishment of workers, especially those at the low end of the
scale. In the context of this economic thesis, each person is an independent agent
who competes for a job with other workers. The result is the gradual destruction of
social solidarity, along with any long-term relationship between employees and
employers. Indeed, jobs are thought of as opportunities bestowed on workers as
opposed to cooperative tasks. The contracts that are enacted between employers and
workers, accordingly, specify few obligations between these parties (Harvey 2007).
In urban areas, while most of the wet waste–cleaning sanitation workers are
employed by municipal corporations that are responsible for managing sewer
waste (Counterview 2014), the majority of such workers1 have been hired tempo-
rarily or on contract, awaiting permanent employment (AHRC 2009; Bathran
2016; Counterview 2014; B. Singh 2012). According to a study, only 11 percent
of sanitation workers are permanently employed by the government, about 43
percent are on contract, and the remaining 46 percent are casual workers (Counter-
view 2014).
Hoping for permanent jobs, the workers employed temporarily or on contract
continue to work at extremely low wages for government agencies for years (B.
Singh 2012). Hiring manual scavengers indirectly through contractors also works
well for the government by absolving it from responsibilities as an employer. In a
similar way, the workers employed privately are exploited and underpaid (AHRC
2009). Because of the contract system and the resulting informalization of employ-
ment, manual scavengers are denied credit from financial institutions and pushed to
private moneylenders who charge exorbitant interest rates (Counterview 2014).
The caste system and the neoliberal policies reinforce each other. The caste
system provides oppressed caste groups as devalued workers who are available at
a low cost to the market. The social imagery of society as a marketplace, where
everyone must compete for work, erodes any social solidarity that survives the caste
system and diminishes any obligations employers may have to workers (Harvey
2007). Hence, oppressed castes, as workers, continue to get exploited in the neo-
liberal society by their employers with sanction by the market system in the form of
profit seeking. The caste system does not simply go unchallenged, but indeed gets
stronger as the market system adapts to or thrives from its underlying inequities to
maintain long-term gains. The result is a nexus of systems of oppression that appear
to be almost natural and difficult to attack.

The Study Approach

While there are a few studies (Darokar 2018, 2020) that present some statistics about
the conditions of urban manual scavengers, little is known about their lifeworlds and
lived experiences. This study aimed to gain an entry into the worlds of manual
scavengers and highlight their challenges in their voices.2
Dubey and Murphy 7

Such a research focus entails the use of a qualitative and exploratory

approach (Murphy et al. 2017). At the core of this project was a distrust of
claims about objectivity. The basic objection is that facts should not be treated
as if they are things or objects devoid of interpretation (Aho and Aho 2008).
Proper research, according to this dictum, must gain access to how this infor-
mation is personally or collectively constructed and interpreted. The resulting
interpretive worlds are thus the focus of attention and must be entered to obtain
valid knowledge. In line with this strategy, semistructured, in-depth interviews
were used with manual scavengers to document and interpret their narratives as
they intended.
Based on the need to engage a world, the interviews conducted in this study were
designed to foster dialogue (Gadamer 1996). But dialogue is not necessarily smooth
but fraught with challenges, missteps, and corrections. In this work, an awareness
was operative that an agreement between the interviewer and interviewee may be
nothing more than a premature understanding established on a superficial reading of
an expression or situation. Most important is that dialogue can only be achieved if
the interlocutors see the need to learn about others. That is, they must begin to
appreciate that any expression can have a variety of meanings that are often very
different from what is expected (Gadamer 1996).
In this study, the guiding principle was that everything has meaning but nothing is
obvious—meanings can defy expectations. Therefore, playback continued in each
interview until mutual corroboration seemed to be achieved. Playback is when an
interviewer interprets what a respondent says and plays back this interpretation to
determine whether this version is correct (Giorgi 1997). The purpose of this check is
to expose the loose connection between meaning and so-called empirical referents,
thereby exposing the polysemy of expressions that is basic to reaching a mutually
satisfying understanding.
As in any conversation, the interlocutors in an interview must feel comfortable
that mutual understanding has been achieved, at least until additional verification is
required. Rather than a procedural matter, these persons must be convinced that they
comprehend each other. But, there is no uniform point where this state is achieved.
Dialogue was thought to occur in this study when the various phases of a story began
to fit into a narrative that seemed to hold together, for example, across various
questions, contextual variations, and topics. In the dialogue that was engaged, these
displays or clusters of meaning were brought to attention and exchanged, through
playback, until the interlocutors were satisfied that mutual understanding had been
achieved. Clarity was not easily accepted but built from the ground up through an
ongoing iterative process.
Once interviews are conducted, and transcripts are ready to be analyzed, the
information on hand should continue to recollect or recall a world. Most important
is that data derived from a world represent an interview dialogue that should be
preserved through checks and verification. In other words, transcripts are not things
but products of dialogue and should be assessed in this context. The point is not
8 Humanity & Society XX(X)

simply to count words or phrases and presume that meaning is captured, if a pattern
of use is revealed. Achieving understanding is trickier.
In this study, as so-called earthy ethic was followed (Marx 1987). That is, at the
heart of dialogue is the principle that persons or groups should be allowed to speak in
their own terms, and any practice that undermines this opportunity is considered to
be unethical. Ethical action, accordingly, requires that persons learn to read one
another in their own terms to establish what Buber (2002) calls “genuine meeting.”
The ethical imperative in this study, essential to all interviews, was to listen, reflect,
and strive to enter the worlds of the persons interviewed.
The study was conducted in Mumbai, the most populated city in India with about
12.4 million people (Census 2011). Mumbai Metropolitan Region includes the areas
under the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM; previously known as
the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation), the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corpora-
tion, and seven other municipal corporations (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Devel-
opment Authority 2013). Being a large metropolitan city, the sanitation
requirements of Mumbai are exacting (Dewoolkar 2018). Darokar (2018) finds that
while the waste generation in Mumbai has increased tremendously in the recent past,
the number of workers and their equipment have remained almost unchanged. A
study on manual scavengers in the city estimated that “an average of 20 sewer
workers die each month from accidents, suffocation or exposure to toxic gases”
(Parth 2014: para. 10). Another study claims that about 3,979 sanitation workers
employed at MCGM died in the span of eight years from 2006 to 2014 (Salve,
Bansod, and Kadlak 2017).
The challenge of sampling was that sanitation workers were found to live in small
groups across different kinds of neighborhoods in the city. Although these groups are
homogeneous within, they are diverse from each other in many ways including their
native places, languages, caste, economic conditions, education status, housing
security, job security, and organizing. Every homogenous group of sanitation work-
ers engaged in similar kinds of manual scavenging and, living in same neighbor-
hood, was regarded as a “community” of manual scavengers.
Once the fieldwork began, it became obvious that only one or two communities of
manual scavengers would not be an appropriate population set for this study since a
comprehensive picture of the manual scavenging communities in the city would not
be provided. The sampling was thus designed to accommodate diverse manual
scavenging communities across Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Potential study par-
ticipants were selected from disparate communities rather than from communities
with similar characteristics. Also, the attempt was made to ensure a wide geogra-
phical spread of the shortlisted communities across the city. The sampling needed
multiple techniques, including convenience, reputational, and snowball sampling, to
identify and approach potential study participants in different regions of Mumbai.3
Another challenge faced when conducting the study was that individual inter-
views would often get converted into group interviews without any prior planning.
As the interviewer met study participants in their safe spaces that were often their
Dubey and Murphy 9

homes, neighborhoods, and sometimes their usual hangouts near their work sites,
there was little control over the presence of other people in these places. Often, the
study participants were more comfortable and open to talking in the presence of their
community members or coworkers. In fact, the conversations were more open,
effortless, and rich with narratives of lived experiences when the conversations with
the participants were joined by their community members or coworkers.
During a period of about 6.5 weeks in early 2018, 20 different communities of
sanitation workers in Mumbai were visited and 49 manual scavengers were inter-
viewed through eight individual and 14 group in-depth interviews.4 As manual
scavenging in urban areas is entirely done by men, all the study participants were
male. Also, all of them were above the age of 18 years. In addition to the manual
scavengers, 19 other people from their communities participated in these inter-
views, thereby totaling 68 study participants. These secondary participants who
joined the interview conversations were either nonmanual scavenging coworkers
of the study participants or their family members such as wives and siblings. The
average interview length is 45 minutes. In the next section, an interpretation of
these interviews is presented in terms of the major themes that were found. An
attempt is made to represent the narratives of the study participants as they
intended (Murphy et al. 2017).

Into the Worlds of Manual Scavengers

Why Call It Manual Scavenging?

The water was so deep around us (hand up to his chest), and all the “butter” was
floating around us . . . . The gutter was full of all the feces. And as we were cleaning
it, people were flushing their toilets from above, someone’s shit, someone’s piss, warm,
everything fell on our bodies. (a participant employed by a public works department for
drainage cleaning)

“We get inside that (sewer tank). Whether the tank is full or empty, we have to get
down in it.” Most of the manual scavengers interviewed admitted that their jobs
need them to enter sewer waste. Even those employed by municipal corporations
shared that they cleaned sewer lines manually: “Machine can clean only at the
main spot. The machine cannot go further inside.” Another such participant
expressed his helplessness: “We have to put our hands or legs inside. We have
to do it. It cannot be done otherwise. Our job is entirely of waste only.” The study
participants revealed that almost none of their employers provided them with the
safety equipment and devices needed and mandated for such wet waste work,
thereby making their job “manual scavenging” and not just regular sanitation
work. They described the different ways in which they were recruited into manual
scavenging, a prohibited practice, through a widely practiced and poorly regulated
contract system.
10 Humanity & Society XX(X)

Forms of Employment for Manual Scavenging

In Dattak Vasti work, everyone is after us. There is a lot of pressure on us. If anyone
complains (about workers) they come immediately. Whoever supervisor is there, he
comes immediately—“Why have you not removed the trash?” If we have come back
home, he will call us and ask us to come back there, even if it is an off day. This is how
it is. They trouble us a lot.

Manual scavenging is practiced throughout the city of Mumbai, primarily for the
maintenance of three kinds of infrastructure—(i) sewer lines and open drains
running under the public area that is maintained by the city municipal corporations
and the public works departments (16 participants), (ii) residential apartments that
hire sanitation workers to maintain their internal sewer systems (16 participants),
and (iii) slum and semislum settlements in the city that have community toilets and
their sewer waste are released into open drains (the work is called Dattak Vasti,
which translates as “the adopted ones”; seven participants). Additionally, many
sanitation workers are open to random, one-time contractual work of unclogging
manholes for extra income. This work is done mainly by contractual corporation
workers who collect dry trash and clean streets (the work is called Jhadu Khata; 10
participants).

Safety and Health Issues

[W]e cannot even work wearing the hand gloves . . . . Our entire work is based on touch.
We have to figure out whether this is a stone or some other waste, then we have to fill
the bucket. We cannot figure it out using hand gloves. In that water, we cannot see.

“Our hands get injured by glass pieces, injections, everything from the hospital
sewer lines.” Indeed, the participants had hardly any protection against sharp objects
when they entered sewers. One participant who demanded safety equipment for
cleaning gutters questioned during the interview said, “there are a lot of bugs and
spiders in it . . . we have no protection . . . . We are also human beings, isn’t it right?”
Additionally, the safety material such as gloves, mask, and boots provided by
municipal corporations to employees were of poor quality, often unavailable, and
inefficient for protection. A participant recollected using the mask provided by the
municipal corporation once while cleaning a manhole—“I could take out just two
bucket soil, that’s it. I started struggling to breathe.” Another participant com-
plained, “we get the shoes of one size only. Then suppose he wears number 9 and
I need number 7, then will I wear number 9 shoes?” Some of them receive safety
equipment only occasionally as this participant did: “If their inspectors come any
day to check us, we are given those [safety equipment] only on that day to wear.”
Some participants complained that they don’t even get soap to clean themselves after
Dubey and Murphy 11

work. “If we find any soap in the trash anywhere, we pick that up and bring and wash
our hands with it,” shared one of them.
Almost never were they provided masks with oxygen supply.5 The only
safety measure most of the participants depended on was having some “backup,”
that is sanitation workers who wait outside for rescuing them from dying inside
manholes in case they start suffocating. However, as observed in many cases of
sewer deaths, even the backup workers who enter manholes to help their col-
leagues end up dying along with them when hit by poisonous gases. This
practice, instead, has made the casualties much higher since workers die in
groups. A participant described such a case of two sewer deaths that happened
the previous year in Mumbai:

We know that case. Those boys had turned black . . . . There was a septic tank close by.
And there is a chemical company. There was this gas from the chemicals in there (in the
sewer line). In that, first, one boy went, worked, and came outside. And then, his mobile
phone dropped. When he went to take out the mobile phone, he got trapped inside. The
second boy who went inside to take him out, he also died. First, that boy died, and then,
the other boy.

Also, all the participants except one reported that they were not compensated
even if they got injured during work.
The participants reported frequently getting ill. Many of them had experienced
suffocation, illness, and hospitalization because of the poisonous gases emitting
from sewer waste. One participant shared:

I have suffered a lot. Not just some injuries but we get sick also a lot of times in that
work. If we fall sick, then we have to stay admitted to a hospital for 10–15 days . . . . It
makes our condition very bad. If you do the work of sewer one day, you will not get up
for four to five days.

Some other problems commonly experienced by the participants were infections,

fever, headaches, burning sensation on the skin, hardening and cracking of hands,
loss of appetite, and a persisting stench of sewer waste on their hands and bodies.
One participant bothered by the persisting stench on his hands cleans them often
with acid—“what we use to clean toilets,” he told. Another participant claimed, “the
life of a worker like us is shorter.” Most of the participants reported that there was no
medical insurance available to them. Those who could obtain insurance found the
process too cumbersome:

It is a long procedure. First, we have to pay the bills, then we have to show the medical
certificate, then they pay the expenses . . . . It gets troublesome later on. Do this, do that,
go here, go there. So instead of this running around, we pay whatever medical expenses
are there.
12 Humanity & Society XX(X)

The Contract System and Exploitation

There are 14 wings (of buildings) like that. To do the work of 14 wings . . . I mean in
that you should understand how many apartments there are, and which apartments’
trash is to be collected. And after that, the society does not cooperate with sanitation
workers. As the gutter gets full, it spills over and floods. After it gets full, we have to
get down in it. There is a pipe inside it and we have to clean it from inside there and
then empty it. I ask the society people to give me hand gloves, shoes, mask, they
directly refuse it. They say that they don’t have it, you get it from your money. What
does the society give us? 200 Rupees (US$2.70 a day). We take out so much waste.

All the participants employed at residential apartments and in slum and semislum
settlements as Dattak Vasti workers were hired on contract and had no job security
or promise of permanent employment. The corporation employees who worked for
Jhadu Khata (dry waste cleaning and collection) were also mostly on contracts. Only
these contractual workers hired by corporations had the promise of permanent jobs if
they continued working for almost a decade on contract. Despite such decade-long
waiting periods, permanent government jobs were coveted because of the job secu-
rity, a higher salary, and a pension after retirement. The participants hired by munic-
ipal corporations for drainage work were the only ones permanently employed and
who had these provisions.
While the sanitation workers in any area under municipal corporations remained
the same for years, the contractors who bid and got selected to employ and manage
these workers kept changing every six months. The selection was based on a lottery
system. Also, there was no assurance that a new contractor would necessarily hire all
the sanitation workers employed by a former contractor. Every six months, sanita-
tion workers would go through the fear of losing their livelihoods if they were not
hired by the new contractor.
In residential apartments and housing societies, the contract system is entirely
unmonitored by any external agency and often ends up exploiting workers much
more as in this case:

Three contractors are involved in between. Three agents eat away their commission in
between. The society people say that they have already raised the salary amount and
paid them. But the contractors say that when the society people will raise the amount,
then your salary will increase.

Such residential societies also prefer to keep changing their contractors and
sanitation workers every few years to avoid legal responsibilities: “They say that
they don’t want to hire for a lot of days. They want to keep changing [workers] in
every five or six years.” A few participants shared that such employers sometimes
did not pay the promised amount:
Dubey and Murphy 13

In the last monsoon, I cleaned the drainage of all the buildings. They still haven’t given
us some of that money . . . . Now he is saying that you have to clean not just 250
manholes but more than that, that is what is written in the contract. I told him if there
is even one more manhole extra there, let me know. You should count them all. They
did not do that.

In addition, random one-time contractual work could come from anyone—

small house owners, small residential apartments, commercial areas, industrial
areas, and municipal corporations that need more workers temporarily. One
participant described the temporary work assignments given by a municipal
corporation:

All of us do it. I also do it. I come back [from work] and do it as my secondary job . . . . It
is private. I mean under the municipal corporation. Because it is the municipal corpo-
ration paying us the salary. Now in monsoon, the thing is they have to clean the gutters
by April. They have to clean everything. So, we clean the gutters in lanes, gullies, and
on the roads.

Such work was assigned through verbal contracts that could be violated easily:
“Before we clean, they promise a certain amount. Then later they go back on that.”
One participant who did not get paid for a previous job was told while receiving his
next assignment, “do this work. We will give you all the money together.” During
this second assignment of cleaning a septic tank, three of his coworkers died. He and
the victims’ families never got any money from the employer.
The income varied drastically among the participants. While permanently
employed workers at the municipal corporations earned about INR 25,000
(US$337) a month, two salary ranges existed among the contractual workers. The
contractual workers who were members of labor unions earned up to INR 13,400
(US$181) for 27 days of work. But, the contractual workers who were not repre-
sented by any union got a monthly salary of up to INR 6,000 (US$81) for the same
work. This amount is less than half of what the unionized contractual workers got
and about a quarter of the salary of permanently employed workers. The lowest paid
workers include Dattak Vasti workers, drainage workers at the public works depart-
ment, and those working at housing societies.
All the contractual workers reported that they had to take random jobs of cleaning
gutters to make ends meet. “When we leave in the morning from home, we think that
whatever little work I get, I should be able to bring back some money home,” shared
one participant. These workers also did not get any employment document, which
denied them access to banking and formal loan facilities that require documents and
proofs. “Our names are not even there in their (employer’s) register,” stated one
participant. This practice leaves workers vulnerable and denies their rights if they
meet with any accident during work. A participant described how this works based
on a case he witnessed:
14 Humanity & Society XX(X)

suppose I have climbed up, I am working at the third floor, I have neither my ID proof
here, nor I have my name in the register, and also there is no record at the office. Even if
I fall and die, they will say that I was doing a private work. Whose employee is he? No,
no. He was doing a private work.

Also, some participants reported that their salaries were often delayed. They had
to resort frequently to private moneylenders and pay heavy interest rates. Also, no
contractual workers had paid leaves. The workload assigned was another reason that
some of them couldn’t take a day off from work: “He doesn’t take a leave. If he takes
a leave then next day it will be dirtier, and it will need more cleaning. He will not be
able to work that hard. He is an old man.”

The Complicity of Government Office Holders

I used to clean a public toilet, even the ladies’ toilet, bathroom, I used to clean them.
I used to live in the public toilet only . . . . And if a toilet would clog then I had to unclog
the gutter outside too . . . . The corporator called me and gave me the work of another
public toilet as well.

Dattak Vasti is a practice under direct jurisdiction of a public-elected position holder

called the corporator,6 and a practice where the exploitation of sanitation workers
was most apparent. Except one, all the participants doing Dattak Vasti work reported
having to clean sewer waste without protective equipment. A disgusted participant
declared, “if you now see that gutter [we clean], you will ask us if we are humans or
what to enter that waste!” The inhumane practice continues despite corporators
being in regular touch with Dattak Vasti workers. All participants confirmed that
corporators regularly gave direct instructions to all sorts of sanitation workers,
including those at municipal corporations, to act on sanitation-related complaints
received from public. Their lack of awareness about workers’ conditions was, there-
fore, unlikely.
One Dattak Vasti participant was hired especially because of his small size and
ability to enter and clean narrow drains. “Nobody else can enter it. Only I go inside,”
he shared. However, he reported that he did not receive any salary for his work. He
was left to survive by collecting charity money from all the houses in the area he
cleaned. Being homeless, illiterate, and having difficulty speaking made it easy for
his contractor to exploit him. “He does the job of three men alone and he doesn’t get
the salary for his labor,” his friend complained.
From the remaining participants, two were scheduled to clean the choked gutter
within the premises of the collector’s office the next day after the interview. The
district collector, a governmental representative who oversees the implementation of
its policies and programs in a district, is also responsible for eradicating manual
scavenging from their jurisdiction (Prohibition of Employment of Manual
Dubey and Murphy 15

Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013). However, these participants admitted
that they had been cleaning the same premises always without using any safety
equipment and nobody ever objected. They were afraid of losing their jobs if the
story came out in the news media.

Enforced Voicelessness

We have shouted so much and got tired, but we are not getting it (medical insurance).
They say that the details will come, fill the form. We have filled the form 50 times and
submitted. Nothing happens. Nobody pays any heed. They think that we will come,
shout, and then we will leave.

Those employed permanently at municipal corporations could raise their concerns

but were often ineffective. Municipal corporations often resorted to ignoring them
and procrastinating any positive action: “They never listen no matter how much we
say it. They just keep saying yes we will do it, that’s it.” Disciplinary actions were
also taken to silence any objection: “We cannot fight much. If the senior has said
something, we have to do it. Otherwise he will threaten to report this against us.”
Among those employed contractually, many believed that asking employers for
their rights could result in them losing their jobs. As one participant commented, “if
we complain then they silence us.” Those working at municipal corporations
couldn’t report their problems or complain directly about contractors to municipal
corporations. “If we go directly to the municipal corporation office then we are not
allowed inside,” claimed a participant. Another complained, “we are not able to
reach the people we want to reach, people who can listen to us. Our voice doesn’t
reach their ears.” A participant, who criticized his contractor, was reported by a
municipal corporation officer to his contractor.
Some participants who worked at housing societies revealed that they felt scared
of rich, educated, and high-caste people, and this was the reason why they couldn’t
do much to demand their rights. One participant described his fears: “These people
are at a high caste, they are at a higher level, and if they do anything to me, then what
will my family do? There is only one earning member in the family.” Another
participant opened up and talked about his employers: “When I look at them, I feel
scared. They are like this. They harass us.” As he went on to explain, “we have to get
scared, what can we do? I have little children at home.”
A few participants believed that corporators would act on their complaints if
requested, but more out of charity than duty. Regardless, no participant reported
any action from a corporator on their concerns. Those who were members of labor
unions reported that their unions were helpful occasionally but not always. A parti-
cipant disappointed with his labor union said, “we have become tired of saying it to
the union now, we have become tired of saying it to everyone. Nothing is
happening.”
16 Humanity & Society XX(X)

Caste and Class Struggles

My father was doing this choke up work only. Once I came back from the school and
brought food for him and I saw that my father was inside a gutter. And I am watching
him from a distance. It took him from 1 p.m. till 4 p.m. and he still could not clear the
choked gutter. I mean that food was kept like that only. Then I asked my father to
come out, I bathed him . . . . Then I said that now you eat food, let me see it. Somehow
I did it, on top of it I could see all the shit and everything floating. Somehow,
I unwillingly took off my school dress and dived straight inside holding my nose.
I entered it . . . . [Earlier] I used to get disgusted on seeing it, [but] since then I have
become an expert at the same work.

Majority of the participants were from SCs that have been traditionally engaged in
manual scavenging. An SC participant whose three generations had lived in Mumbai
asserted, “whoever is from our caste is doing the cleaning job only.” Currently, a
major influx of workers for sanitation and manual scavenging in Mumbai comes
from recent first-generation SC migrants, often former agricultural laborers from
rural India. Such participants were introduced to the work mostly through their
family members, relatives, friends, or neighbors. With regard to manual scavenging,
the employment system in Mumbai still heavily depends on caste networks for a
cheap workforce: “We get the job only through the people we know.”
After SCs, the next major caste engaged in manual scavenging in the city was the
Vadari community. Vadaris are from a nomad Shudra community7 in Andhra Pra-
desh and were traditionally into stone crafting, a profession that has become irrele-
vant in modern India:

we used to work with stones, make holes in the stone for grinding. I raised my
children doing that work somehow. It has been at least 25 years doing that . . . [But]
nobody does it now. Everyone uses mixer now. Now our work has also stopped. Now
nobody buys it.

A community of traditionally skilled workers has become unemployed and

unskilled with the modernization in the country. Many people from the Vadari
community in Mumbai have moved to manual scavenging for a livelihood.
Vadari participants reported that despite their caste not being considered untouch-
able in Hinduism, society practiced untouchability against them on seeing them clean-
ing waste. “They act as if we are very wretched people,” said one participant. Even
those who were not SCs were treated as untouchables because of doing sanitation
work, which is traditionally done by SC communities who are deemed untouchable:

When we go to get the trash, they throw the box from a distance, and they would say,
“no, stay away.” And if a sanitation worker goes there to sweep, they tell him, “hey
sweeper, you move aside now. First, let this person go.” This is how they talk.
Dubey and Murphy 17

Frequently, most of the participants experienced similar untouchability when

they asked for drinking water or tea at the residential societies they cleaned—
sometimes denied, sometimes offered in unclean or broken cups:

Once the holder of a clay cup breaks, it should be discarded. What they do is that they
keep it. They think that if one day the sweeper or the manual scavenger asks for tea,
then we will offer it in this cup.

Two participants reported that the residents at their work sites hurled casteist slurs
at them. “They insulted our entire community,” the participants shared. Another
participant concluded, “there is no dignity in this work. There is no doubt about it.”
The participants were determined to educate their children so that they would not
have to work as manual scavengers. However, while on the one hand private schools
are expensive because of the privatization of the education sector, on the other,
government schools that are still affordable have poor quality of education. The
participants reported that when their children attend government schools, they lose
interest in education and drop out easily:

If you go to a municipality school which starts at 7 in the morning, you will see that till
10 a.m. the teachers would be sitting inside the office only, chewing tobacco, etc. Even
if they take a class, they hardly teach for half an hour. How will the children of our
community focus then? They don’t get education; they get only fun and play time.
Later as they grow, they start feeling hungry to earn.

Sometimes, children from slum areas were also refused admissions in English-
medium schools despite children’s legal right to education in the country: “These
days they don’t take slum children in English medium school.”
Unemployment among the educated youth of manual scavenging communities
was another common problem. “In our caste, even the one person who gets educa-
tion out of a hundred, he is also unemployed,” claimed one participant. Some
participants shared that their children found the educated youth in the community
to be jobless very demoralizing. The unemployed educated youth of manual scaven-
ging communities were also getting into sanitation work for livelihood. A participant
shared:

Now even if they have studied class 15, 16, or 17 (undergraduation and graduation),
then also they don’t have any job. He (a fellow worker) did not get any job. He has done
a BA (Bachelor of Arts) and is still doing this same work (of sanitation).

When children would see young educated people of their community also doing
sanitation work, they would argue that there was no point in going to school.
“Educated people are also doing this work,” they would point out to their parents
and stop studying.
18 Humanity & Society XX(X)

The participants shared that moving out of manual scavenging was not easy. They
did not have other job opportunities, the needed skills or education, or the financial
leverage to set up their own shops or businesses. Some participants had also been
asked to pay bribes when they sought better jobs. Those who tried to quit manual
scavenging had to often come back to this work because of a lack of other oppor-
tunities: “I tried at a lot of places for work . . . . I gave up in the end and came here to
work (as a manual scavenger).” Also, many participants reported not having access
to affirmative action provisions meant for them because of various reasons such as
being unable to provide the needed paperwork, incapable of paying bribes, and
misinformation about the programs. Those who were illiterates and/or migrants
faced additional challenges:

They need a proof of past 50 years that you are living there. Or the generation before
yours was living there . . . . Then they say, “go to that officer, fill that form, bring this
paper, bring that paper, get a certificate from the corporator, get a letter of introduction,
get a letter from this officer, that officer, get this get that.”

Systems of Oppression
The themes presented in the above section should be seen as interconnected, one
feeding into another, facilitated and at times enforced by the systems of oppression
to maintain a constant stream of labor available to exploit. The narratives shared
reveal that the caste system still very much exists in India, both within the state
machinery and in society. The society continues to perceive manual scavenging as
polluted, as prescribed by the caste framework, and the state continues to draw the
labor from SCs while making no attempt to stop manual cleaning and strengthen the
rights and dignity of workers in action. The state is also instrumental in enabling
the market system to exploit workers by creating the needed policy environment
with almost negligible accountability of employers and no regard for workers’
concerns. The market system, in turn, contributes to maintaining the caste status
quo by depriving workers of decent work and wages, and thereby development
opportunities. As a result, the communities oppressed by the caste system continue
to face oppression within the market system, and their next generations get pushed
into the same cycles that are meticulously designed and maintained.

Conclusion
This article helps illustrate the experiences of urban manual scavengers and their
pressing concerns and places these issues within the framework of larger, repressive
systems that should be critiqued. Also highlighted are how unheard and unrepre-
sented urban manual scavengers are faring at present. Some of the issues they
discussed are very critical. First, any form of manual handling of sewer waste is
prohibited and should be recognized as a serious violation of the human and labor
Dubey and Murphy 19

rights of workers and must be stopped immediately, while technological alternatives

should be explored. Also, efforts to stop manual scavenging should not result in the
loss of livelihood or earnings for the workers, which is one of their major concerns.
Second, the unregulated contract system and the resulting disparity in income and
rights of workers should be acknowledged and addressed. The role of government
officials in maintaining the status quo should also be critically investigated, and
stricter policies and inspections should come about. And last, immediate actions are
needed on a massive scale to ensure that the rightful provisions, such as safety gear
and health care, are given to government as well as private workers. At the same
time, reporting systems need to be amended so that sanitation workers can reveal
violations of their rights in confidence and participate in the process of reform.

Authors’ Note
This article came out of the PhD dissertation of Sheeva Y. Dubey published in 2018 with the
title “Subaltern Communication for Social Change: The Struggles of Manual Scavengers in
India” (available at https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/2214/).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

ORCID iD
Sheeva Y. Dubey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0235-0672

Notes
1. The term “sanitation workers” refers to all sorts of workers engaged in cleaning jobs,
including those who handle dry and wet waste and those who sweep. Only some sanitation
workers are dedicatedly engaged in manual scavenging, that is, in handling human waste.
2. This study was undertaken for the dissertation of one of the authors. The primary research
objective of the dissertation study was to explore the communication practices and chal-
lenges of manual scavengers as they express their concerns or raise their voices.
3. Further details on the sampling approach can be found in Dubey’s (2018b) dissertation
titled “Subaltern Communication for Social Change: The Struggles of Manual Scavengers
in India.”
4. The study was reviewed and approved by the Internal Review Board of University of
Miami in 2018.
5. The only exception to this were three permanently employed “divers” at Mumbai Corpo-
ration of Greater Mumbai. They claimed that they were the only workers in entire
20 Humanity & Society XX(X)

Maharashtra who had access to oxygen-supplied masks and had been trained by the Indian
Navy for working in deepwater.
6. Corporators are public-elected government representatives who, in addition to other obli-
gations, are responsible for being available to citizens for urgent public infrastructure-
related problems and for guiding municipal corporations’ development projects and funds
in their wards (Times News Network 2017).
7. Some of the most marginalized Shudra caste communities have been identified and sched-
uled as “other backward classes” (OBC) by the Indian government. OBCs are not same as
scheduled castes (SCs) and are higher in the caste hierarchy than SCs. Another difference
being that OBCs are not considered untouchable in the Hindu caste system.

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