Before the city wakes, they’ll be already at work. Every morning, across all Indian city Sanitation workers descend into drains, sweep public roads, and collect waste that the rest of society discards literally and socially. Their labour is what makes urban life possible. Their existence, however, remains institutionally invisible. In India, 68% of sanitation workers belong to Scheduled Castes, and 95–98% of manual scavengers are women. This is not a pre-modern residue of a feudal past. It is actively reproduced every day through contemporary contractor regimes, municipal employment practices, caste-based occupational fixity and the systematic denial of legal protections that exist on paper but never reach the people they are written for.
Across India, the sanitation workforce reflects the same demographic profile with striking uniformity. Workers are predominantly SC women over the age of fifty, most without formal education beyond primary level, many widowed. They enter sanitation work, not by choice but through post-mortem job inheritance, a functioning contemporary mechanism by which a widow inherits her deceased husband's sanitation post, keeping the occupation locked within the caste-household across generations. Some falsify Aadhaar age records simply to continue working, having no pension, no savings, and no alternative livelihood available to them.
The most fundamental violence experienced by sanitation workers in India is not merely economic, it is existential. These workers are not simply underpaid; they are treated as untouchables, confined to an occupation by birth and denied the possibility of any other life. Caste discrimination is not incidental to the system, rather is the mechanism that keeps the entire structure in place. Workers frequently describe being treated as less than human in both workplaces and public spaces: avoided, addressed with contempt, and tolerated only insofar as they remove society’s filth. When they attempt to seek alternative employment in shops, offices or households caste operates as an invisible but impenetrable wall. Employers recognise surnames, ask for caste certificates, and the answer is almost always the same: not here. This is not individual prejudice, it is structural exclusion enforced collectively, socially, and institutionally across generations.
This occupational imprisonment reproduces itself through post-mortem job inheritance, where daughters and daughters-in-law absorb the sanitation post when a family member dies, because no other door will open. The occupation is not chosen, but is inherited the way caste itself is inherited : by birth and by the systematic closure of every alternative. What caste discrimination ultimately produces is a captive labour force. Workers cannot leave because society will not receive them elsewhere. This captivity is what makes sub-minimum wages possible, contractor exploitation sustainable, and dignified exit structurally impossible. The cheapness of Dalit sanitation labour is not a market outcome it is a caste outcome. Until caste discrimination in employment is confronted directly—through meaningful enforcement, institutional accountability, and broader social transformation—sanitation work in India will remain not merely an occupation, but a caste-imposed sentence.
Photo Courtesy: Dalberg
The Safai Karamcharis - the community historically assigned to sanitation work bear this burden disproportionately. Despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 explicitly outlawing manual scavenging, the practice continues in both overt and disguised forms across India. According to government data, thousands of deaths occur annually to sewers and septic tanks workers by suffocation, drowning, or toxic gas exposure in confined spaces. Between 2017 and 2023, over 500 sanitation workers died in sewage-related accidents, with the majority being Dalit men and women employed informally through contractors. Families receive little to no compensation. Cases rarely reach court. Even though the law exists; enforcement does not take place. The Safai Karamchari Andolan, a national movement founded by activists including Bezwada Wilson, has spent decades documenting these deaths and demanding the complete eradication of manual scavenging. Their work has made the scale of the problem impossible to ignore at the legislative level. Yet, the gap between legislative recognition and material transformation remains enormous. The state acknowledges the problem in its statutes while reproducing it through its own employment and procurement practices.
The sanitation workers' protests in Chennai brought this national crisis into sharp public focus. In one of India's largest cities, contract sanitation workers the majority of which are Dalit women took to the streets, demanding regularisation of employment, minimum wage enforcement, and basic social security benefits including PF and ESI. Their demands were not new. They had been raised through union channels, submitted as written complaints, and forwarded through official grievance mechanisms for years. None of it produced a structural change. What the Chennai protests made visible was the precise mechanism of evasion: the contractor-municipality interposition. The Chennai Corporation outsources sanitation work to private contractors, who in turn employ workers on informal, undocumented terms. When workers demand their rights, the corporation points to the contractor. When they approach the contractor, they are told to "adjust or leave." This triangular structure including the worker, contractor and municipality is not a failure of coordination. It is a deliberate architecture that insulates the state from accountability while allowing it to benefit from the cheapest possible labour. The Chennai protests also demonstrated the limits of conventional union bargaining within this structure. Unions can negotiate with employers. When the employer is a contractor who subcontracts from a municipality that denies direct employment, there is no stable counterparty at the table. Workers who went on strike faced replacement. Workers who filed complaints faced termination. The interposition forecloses the very mechanisms through which labour law is supposed to operate.
Pondicherry, as a Union Territory with a distinct administrative structure, presents a specific institutional form of these national patterns. The workforce is composed predominantly of Scheduled Caste women over the age of fifty, many of whom are married or widowed and lack education beyond the tenth standard. A significant number entered the occupation following the death of their husbands, revealing the intergenerational and hereditary nature of sanitation labour. The gendered division of labour within the sector is rigid and deeply entrenched. Women are assigned tasks such as street sweeping, waste collection, and drain cleaning, while men operate vehicles and occupy supervisory positions that offer higher wages and greater authority. Not a single woman has been offered the opportunity to operate vehicles or hold supervisory roles. This exclusion is not accidental, nor can it be dismissed as administrative oversight; It is the occupational expression of caste-gender hierarchy.
The PPE disparity is both literal and symbolic. Male workers receive boots and protective equipment. Women do not. Among night-shift workers, even the limited equipment available often goes unused, not because workers are unaware of the risks, but because the task-based wage structure actively discourages safety practices. Every minute spent wearing gloves, putting on boots, or handling protective equipment is perceived as a minute lost from completing tasks that determine their wages. In such a system, safety becomes economically unaffordable. The labour structure itself compels workers to choose between protection and survival, revealing how occupational risk is normalised and unevenly distributed along the intersecting lines of caste, class, and gender.The contractor regime in Pondicherry operates identically to its national counterparts. Workers hold no appointment letters, no identity cards, no wage slips. Contractors claim that PF and ESI contributions are made, but workers possess no documentation confirming this. Photographic attendance has been introduced as a system that records workers' bodies for the contractor's administrative purposes while producing no reciprocal document for the worker. This is asymmetric surveillance: it documents presence without acknowledging rights, creating an evidentiary record that serves the contractor and leaves the worker with nothing.
Monthly wages in Pondicherry range from ₹5,000 to ₹8,000 and are paid by bank transfer. The amount varies from month to month without explanation. There is no mechanism to contest underpayment. The gazette notification specifying the minimum wage exists but it does not reach the workers. The Inspector-cum-Facilitator established under the Code on Wages does not reach them. The regularity of electronic payment lends a veneer of formality that obscures the unlawfulness of the amount being transferred. This condition introduces the concept of administered ignorance: the structured, institutional production of workers' ignorance of their specific statutory entitlements. This is not ignorance that results from workers failing to seek information. It is ignorance that is produced and maintained by the system through the non-distribution of gazette notifications, the absence of workplace inspections, the unavailability of documents, and the contractor regime's active suppression of any channel through which workers might learn what they are legally owed.
Beyond wages, these endure triple compression, a condition that exceeds the standard double-burden model of social reproduction theory. They perform eight to ten hours of sanitation work, then supplementary paid domestic labour in other households, then unpaid reproductive labour at home all compressed onto a single woman who is frequently the sole earner in her household. Marriage debts ranging from ₹50,000 to two lakhs bind them further to the occupation. The combination of widowhood, sub-minimum wages, caste-occupational fixity, and marriage debt creates a bind that no single policy intervention can break. Sanitation work is the socialised form of reproductive labour. The cleanliness of the city is produced by women whose own reproduction is systematically suppressed.
Despite having only partial knowledge of the specific statutes meant to protect them, sanitation workers are acutely aware that their rights are being denied. They may not know the exact provisions of the Code on Wages or the Manual Scavengers Act by name, but they know, with absolute certainty, that what they receive falls far short of what they are owed. Workers are deeply concerned about contractor threats of dismissal that silence any attempt to demand their rights, while financial instability compounded by sub-minimum wages, marriage debts, and the complete absence of social security leaves them too economically vulnerable to risk losing even the exploitative employment they have.
Yet workers are not passive. They organise collectively, discuss their conditions at worksites, raise demands through union channels, and articulate their situation with a precision that puts many academic analyses to shame. Their own words constitute a theoretically exact diagnosis of the caste-capitalist relation: "We are paid less because society treats us as inferior people doing dirty work. Without our labour, this city would collapse in days. The problem is not our work; the problem is caste." This is not grievance. It is analysis. Workers know their labour is essential. They know the valuation placed on them by the system is false. The gap between their own understanding and the value assigned by the system is itself the clearest articulation of what caste-gendered capitalism does and what must be confronted to undo it. Yet union complaints have produced no structural outcomes. The contractor-municipality interposition forecloses conventional bargaining at every turn. Resistance confirms worker agency. It does not, under current structural conditions, produce structural change.
The gap between statutory architecture and material conditions is not an implementation deficit. It is the institutional form of caste-gendered capitalism. Non-enforcement is not a failure of the labour regime, it is its operative logic. Recognising this is the precondition for any meaningful reform. Concretely, many changes are necessary. Abolish contractor interposition and move to direct municipal employment using Section 10 of the Contract Labour Act, which empowers governments to prohibit contract labour in specified industries. Mandate documentary entitlements such as appointment letters, wage slips, identity cards as non-negotiable conditions of employment, verified independently of contractors. Enforce gender-equal PPE provision at worksite level, with verification mechanisms that do not rely on contractor self-reporting. Replace task-rate wage structures with time-rate wages, removing the financial incentive that currently penalises safety.
Beyond these immediate measures, the deeper transformation required is political. The conditions of sanitation workers will not be changed by better implementation of existing statutes alone. They will change only through political transformation that addresses the caste-gendered cheapening of labour-power as a constitutive feature of the present order through Dalit feminist organising, substantive enforcement of constitutional guarantees, and the political will to dismantle the contractor regime that the state has found so profitable to maintain. The gap is not a failure of the system. It is the system. And dismantling it requires nothing less than structural justice for the women who clean this country's cities before the rest of the country wakes, and who have been waiting, far too long, for the country to see them.
