A decade after the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) began with the promise of a clean and dignified India, sanitation workers in Rajasthan continue to die, quite literally, in the line of duty. Inside septic tanks, amid toxic gases, and with no safety gear, these workers pay the ultimate price for a nation’s cleanliness. They receive no titles, no dignity, no protection or safeguards, often condemned to live in obscurity and die in the dark.
Just in the past month, over a dozen sanitation workers from across Rajasthan, including in Alwar, Bikaner, and Deeg have found themselves trapped in sewers and septic tanks, with a majority not making it out alive.
The climax to this tragic spree came last week in Jaipur where four workers died from toxic fumes while trying to retrieve gold particles from a septic tank in a jewellery factory. The Jaipur disaster underscores that these incidents are no anomalies but symptoms of a broken system that celebrates cleanliness in political speeches but ignores the helpless labour that powers it.
Moreover, the deaths in Rajasthan are not isolated mishaps but reflect a nationwide pattern wherein sanitation workers risk their lives daily as the scourge of manual scavenging persists despite laws and policy prescriptions.
Killed While Retrieving Gold from Septic Tank
While each tragedy entails huge human costs, it may be instructive to delve a bit deeper into the Jaipur case which serves up a microcosm of the fraught conditions of sanitation workers across India.
The latest tragedy unfolded on 26 May when, after hours of fearful hesitation, two workers descended in a 10-ft-deep septic tank to recover gold residue from the chemical sludge of a jewellery unit in the Sitapura Industrial Area. As per media reports, the workers had refused to enter the septic tank due to intense heat and toxic gases but company management lured them with the promise of extra money.
The pair of workers who first descended into the tank began gasping and calling for help immediately. Though six others went down the tank to help the first two, they also fell unconscious. Ultimately, four workers were suffocated to death. A preliminary probe into the matter has reportedly revealed that no workers had any protective gear and factory owners had no device even to measure the poisonous gases in the tank.
The Jaipur tragedy reveals just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to manual scavenging, which is still an everyday reality for sanitation workers, despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act of 2013.
On 22 May, three workers died cleaning a septic tank at a wool garments mill in Bikaner.
On 15 May, five workers got trapped in a septic tank in Deeg. One of them died and the others became critically ill.
On 19 April, two sanitation workers including a minor lost their lives due to suffocation while cleaning the sewer line at a paper mill in Alwar. The minor was a 13-year-old helper, who had gone into the sewer to check on the older worker when the latter failed to resurface from the sewer.
For a country that claims to have abolished manual scavenging, ten deaths inside sewers does not bode well.
A Tragic Game of Numbers
The numbers may appear shocking but this is the reality of Rajasthan, which - if the government is to be believed - is 'free of manual scavengers'.
In a written reply to Rajya Sabha in July 2023, Minister of State for Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Ramdas Athawale said out of 766 districts in the country, 530 districts have reported themselves as manual scavenging-free, inluding all the 33 former districts of Rajasthan (the number of districts was increased to 41 on 1 January 2025 citing administrative ease). The data came from two surveys, conducted at the initiative of the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment during the years 2013 and 2018 for the identification of manual scavengers.
While the government claims that the number of manual scavengers - defined as someone engaged or employed to manually clean, carry, dispose of, or otherwise handle human excreta in insanitary latrines, open drains, or pits - has reduced, the number of sewer deaths remains high, as seen in the recent cases across Rajasthan.
The Supreme Court of India's directives ban any manual cleaning of septic tanks and prescribe all companies with such tanks to have PPE gas detector machines to measure the extent of poisonous gases.
They must also have in their possession oxygen masks, helmets, and other protective gear to be given to sanitation workers. All of these were reportedly missing in the jewellery factories in Jaipur’s Sitapura Industrial Area where the recent deaths occurred. Activists working for the rights of sanitation workers I spoke with further allege that factory owners collude with government officials who monitor them, making laws easy to flout in Rajasthan and across the country, leaving workers vulnerable.
A recent report by Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch (DASAM) sheds light on the structural flaws and governmental apathy in investigations of cases of workers' deaths in sewers/septic tanks - like the two sanitation workers killed while cleaning a septic tank in a West Delhi shopping mall.
The report and several others by civil society organisations in the past clearly show that despite the law, sanitation workers get forced into manual cleaning of sewers/septic tanks without mandated safety gear. The poor situation of labour laws in the informal sector makes it not so hard to fathom why the recent tragedies in Rajasthan occurred in industrial settings.
What worsens the plight of sanitation workers is the exploitative contractual system under which they work. Municipalities usually outsource sanitation work to private contractors who hire workers informally, without training, protective gear, or any kind of employment security. When a worker dies in a septic tank, authorities and factory owners disown responsibility by claiming the person was not officially employed by them.
In the absence of any clear accountability when such deaths or accidents occur, the victims remain just another life lost to a system designed to ignore them. This legal loophole kills them twice - first in the sewer, and later in the courts of justice. Even compensation is rarely prompt or sufficient and families are left to mourn, without even an acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
Caste Remains a Burden
Beyond legal loopholes or policy failures, the manual scavenging crisis is also about caste discrimination. A vast majority of sanitation workers belong to Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes communities and remain at the lowest rung of socio-economic marginalisation.
As per data tabled in Parliament, between 2019 and 2023, at least 377 people across the country have died from hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. Among the 38,000 workers engaged in such tasks, 91.9 percent were SC, Scheduled Tribe, or other backward class (OBC) communities. Since the victims are mostly Dalit or Adivasi, their deaths don’t shake the national (savarna-dominated) conscience. There are no mass protests or policy revolutions as many see their lives as expendable.
While the number of recorded sewer deaths is shocking, massive underreporting of such cases means that the actual number is far higher.
Changing social mindsets could take decades but the key question is, why has the government not taken any strong action against the scourge?
Failure of Swachh Bharat
The crisis in Rajasthan underlines that while SBM has built millions of toilets and raised public awareness on hygiene, it has shown a glaring indifference towards people who clean the waste.
A 2024 press release by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) states that "Rajasthan has made significant strides" in the implementation of the Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (SBM-G) initiatives, and ranks "10th in the country for ODF Plus Model progress, with 98 percent of its villages declared ODF Plus".
The press note, which outlined the minutes of a "critical review meeting" chaired by Union Minister for Jal Shakti, in Delhi, emphasising Rajasthan's progress and challenges in implementing SBM-G, mentioned other strides made in waste management by the state. But it failed to mention sanitation workers - the key, human element of the waste management system.
Mechanisation of sewer cleaning, which should have been central to SBM, has remained largely elusive. Instead of mechanisation, the establishment continues to rely on manual labour, even though it does not talk about it in official press releases. Instead of employment dignity, employers offer dubious contracts. Instead of safety, they give workers a rope and a ladder - and hope they survive.
Rajasthan’s repeated tragedies underscore the structural gaps in both the laws prohibiting manual scavenging and the Swachh Bharat Mission’s implementation, wherein the monitoring is weak and labour rights are often non-existent.
Cleanliness Needs a Rights-based Lens
The death of sanitation workers is not a just regional problem of Rajasthan alone but a national indictment; they aren’t just a failure of policy but a moral collapse. In an era of rapid urban growth, it is indefensible that 21st-century workers are still dying in pre-19th-century conditions.
The path forward is clear but needs political will. Mechanisation of septic tank/sewer cleaning is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to prevent worker deaths. The government must set a clear deadline to end manual scavenging and mechanised cleaning seems an essential first step for worker safety. But so far, the government's priorities have been elsewhere.
Factory owners and municipalities must be held criminally accountable for violation of safety laws and all sanitation workers should be formally employed, insured, and trained.
A rights-based lens must shape sanitation reform in future. For if the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan is about dignity, it can’t be achieved till labour remains poor, desperate and dangerously vulnerable.
The tragedies in Rajasthan have erupted just when our ruling elite is gloating over India surpassing Japan's GDP to become the world’s fourth largest economy, though half of our population still can’t afford two square meals a day - as testified by our 105th rank in the Global Hunger Index 2024.
Ten long years after Swachh Bharat and multiple images of politicians including Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking to the streets with brooms, India may have sanitised (some) streets.
But both Rajasthan and India as a whole must realise that true cleanliness is not about optics. It is about justice and justice begins with sanitation workers who don’t need symbolic gestures on Ambedkar Jayanti but real protection to save them from death in a sewer.
No cleanliness mission can truly succeed until the system values the life of the person in the manhole as much as the cleanliness of the pavement above. A nation cannot call itself clean if it lets its cleaners die in filth.
(The author is a veteran journalist and expert on Rajasthan politics. Besides serving as a Resident Editor at NDTV, he has been a Professor of Journalism at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur. He tweets at @rajanmahan. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)