Four sanitation workers die in Ujjain as India’s sewer‑cleaning fatalities keep rising

Four sanitation workers died in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, while cleaning a hotel's food‑waste chamber. The deaths add to a national tally that shows 859 workers killed in sewer or septic‑tank jobs between 2014 and 2025, including 498 deaths recorded from 2019 to mid‑2026 and 332 deaths across 18 states and union territories during 2021‑26. Overall, 1,350 such deaths have been recorded since 1993. Despite a range of measures – legislation, Supreme Court orders, government programmes, and the availability of mechanised cleaning equipment – the fatalities have not fallen to zero, and the Safai Karamchari Andolan has warned that official figures are severely under‑reported. The government has claimed since 2021 that manual cleaning of excreta from insanitary latrines has been eliminated, a statement that reduces the urgency of inspecting municipal and private sites. Workers from historically marginalised castes continue to dominate these hazardous jobs. The 2013 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act separates hazardous sewer work from manual scavenging, yet workers remain exposed to toxic gases. A 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Dr. Balram Singh strengthened the 2014 Safai Karamchari Andolan guidelines, banning contracts that require workers to enter sewers and raising death compensation to ₹30 lakh per worker. In 2025 an order targeted four metropolitan cities, and in 2026 Bengaluru and Hyderabad received notices to 15 chief secretaries for ignoring a 2023 directive on compensation. Private contractors and municipalities often flout the act by hiring undocumented daily‑wage labour, and the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem scheme has struggled to close the gap between its aims and on‑ground results, focusing on distributing kits instead of eliminating risky situations.

Context

Manual scavenging was outlawed in 2013, but hazardous sewer cleaning remains a separate category that still draws workers from lower castes. Mechanised sanitation schemes aim to replace manual work, yet implementation gaps keep workers at risk.