The Legislative Journey Toward Eradicating Manual Scavenging

In a country where the Constitution abolished untouchability in 1950, it took over four decades for a specific law to ban the practice of manual scavenging. And even after that law arrived in 1993, states dragged their feet, enforcement remained weak, and people continued to die in sewers. The legislative journey toward eradicating manual scavenging is not just a story of statutes – it is a story of delayed justice, caste entrenched in occupation, and the long gap between what the law says and what actually happens on the ground.

What is manual scavenging and why does it persist? 🔗

Manual scavenging refers to the practice of manually cleaning, carrying, or disposing of human excreta – typically from dry latrines, open drains, septic tanks, and railway tracks – without adequate protective equipment. Workers use basic tools like brooms, tin plates, and baskets to handle waste and transport it to disposal sites, often several kilometres away. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 defined a “manual scavenger” as any person employed for manually carrying human excreta.

The occupation is not merely economic – it is deeply rooted in the caste system, historically assigned to the Balmiki (or Valmiki) and Hela (or Mehtar) subcastes, communities placed at the lowest rung of the Dalit hierarchy. Before independence, local governments formally employed scavengers to clean dry latrines in private homes and public facilities – a practice institutionalised further under British colonial rule. The result was an entire community locked into a specific form of labour by birth, not by choice.

Pre-legislative efforts: government directives and early schemes 🔗

Long before any formal law was enacted, the Indian government acknowledged the problem through administrative channels. In 1989, a sub-committee of the Planning Commission’s task force estimated that there were 72.05 lakh dry latrines in the country, all of which needed to be manually cleaned. The same year, the government launched the Low Cost Sanitation for Liberation of Scavengers scheme – a centrally sponsored initiative aimed at converting dry latrines into water pour-flush latrines and constructing new sanitary latrines in their place.

In 1992, the government formulated the National Scheme of Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers and their Dependants, which attempted to address both the sanitation deficit and the livelihoods of those trapped in the practice. The Eighth Five Year Plan allocated Rs. 464 crores toward the liberation of scavengers. However, a Comptroller and Auditor General of India report in 2003 found that the scheme failed to achieve its objectives, with funds either unspent or underutilised and no meaningful correspondence between “liberation” and “rehabilitation” of affected workers.

Despite these efforts, manual scavenging continued unabated in many parts of the country. The government’s own data confirmed the problem was expanding, not shrinking. The absence of a legal prohibition – one backed by criminal penalties – left these administrative schemes without real teeth.

The constitutional framework: rights that were ignored 🔗

India’s Constitution provided the moral and legal foundation for ending manual scavenging long before any specific legislation arrived. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and prohibits its practice in any form. Article 21 guarantees the right to life and personal dignity. Article 23 prohibits forced labour. Article 47 directs the state to regard raising the standard of living of its people and improvement of public health as among its primary duties – a provision that is directly cited in the preamble of the 1993 Act itself.

Yet for decades, these constitutional guarantees remained largely unenforced when it came to sanitation workers. The practice of assigning this degrading labour to specific caste communities was a textbook case of untouchability in action – but without a targeted statute, legal recourse was effectively unavailable to those affected.

The 1993 Act: India’s first central prohibition 🔗

The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 (Act No. 46 of 1993) marked India’s first explicit legislative ban on manual scavenging at the central level. Enacted under the P.V. Narasimha Rao government, the Act prohibited any person from engaging another individual for manually carrying human excreta, and banned the construction or continued use of dry latrines.

The Act was enacted under Article 252 of the Constitution, which allows Parliament to legislate on State List subjects when two or more states pass resolutions requesting central regulation. In the first instance, it applied to Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tripura, and West Bengal, along with all Union Territories. Other states could adopt it through their own legislative resolutions. This structural feature – conditional applicability – turned out to be one of the Act’s most significant weaknesses.

Key provisions of the 1993 Act 🔗

The Act’s core provisions were clear in intent. Section 3 prohibited the employment of manual scavengers and the construction of dry latrines. However, crucially, the prohibition would only come into effect from such date and in such area as the State Government may, by notification, specify – meaning states had discretionary power over when and where the ban would actually apply. The Act also required state governments to implement conversion schemes, turning dry latrines into water-seal (flush) latrines, and empowered District Magistrates or Sub-Divisional Magistrates as Executive Authorities to enforce compliance. Penalties for violations were modest – fines or imprisonment of up to one year – and complaints had to be filed within three months, limiting access to justice.

The Act also established a process for identifying and rehabilitating manual scavengers, including provisions for financial assistance through HUDCO (Housing and Urban Development Corporation) and technical support for alternative employment. These were progressive on paper, but practically, rehabilitation remained largely unrealised.

The problem of delayed enforcement 🔗

The 1993 Act received the President’s assent but remained inoperative for approximately three-and-a-half years. It was finally brought into force in 1997. Even then, adoption by the remaining states was glacially slow – many had to be pressured or court-directed into implementing it. Delhi, for instance, only recognised the Act in 2010, following Supreme Court directions. The National Commission for Safai Karamcharis – itself constituted by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis Act, 1993 and operationalised on 12 August 1994 – repeatedly flagged in its reports that the 1993 Act was not being implemented effectively by states and Union Territories.

The role of the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis 🔗

The National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK) was constituted as a statutory body under the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis Act, 1993. Its mandate was to recommend programmes for eliminating inequalities faced by Safai Karamcharis, study and evaluate rehabilitation schemes, investigate grievances, and monitor implementation of welfare programmes. The Commission’s statutory status lapsed in 2004 when the enabling Act expired, after which it continued as a non-statutory body under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, operating through periodic government resolutions.

The NCSK’s findings over the years were damning. Its reports showed that states were filing false certificates of compliance, that funds were being misused, and that the number of manual scavengers was not declining at the pace the government claimed. In 2021, the NHRC observed that claims by state and local governments of having zero manual scavengers were far from the truth. Government data showed that between 1993 and 2021, at least 971 people died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks.

Judicial intervention and the road to the 2013 Act 🔗

The courts became increasingly important in filling the enforcement gap that the legislature had left open. In December 2003, Safai Karamchari Andolan, along with six civil society organisations and seven individuals from the manual scavenging community, filed a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution. The petition challenged the continued existence of manual scavenging and dry latrines as a violation of Articles 14, 17, 21, and 23. The case reached its conclusion in a landmark judgment on 27 March 2014.

In Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India (2014), a three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice P. Sathasivam, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, and Justice N.V. Ramana held that the continuation of manual scavenging was a blatant violation of Article 17. The court directed all state governments and Union Territories to fully implement the 2013 Act (which had by then been enacted), ordered identification of all persons who had died in sewer work since 1993, and mandated compensation of Rs. 10 lakh per death for the families of victims. It also directed that manual scavenging deaths be treated as criminal offences.

The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 🔗

The 2013 Act replaced the 1993 Act and addressed many of its structural shortcomings. Unlike the 1993 Act, which was enacted under the State List and applied conditionally, the 2013 Act was enacted under the Concurrent List – giving Parliament direct authority to legislate and making it applicable across all states without requiring individual state adoption. The Act broadened the definition of manual scavenging to include cleaning of insanitary latrines, open drains, septic tanks, and railway tracks. It criminalised the employment of any person for hazardous sewer or septic tank cleaning without protective gear, with significantly higher penalties. It made surveys for identifying manual scavengers mandatory and laid out a comprehensive rehabilitation framework – including one-time cash assistance, scholarships for children, residential plots, skill training, and alternative livelihood support.

The 2013 Act also mandated municipalities, cantonment boards, and railway authorities to provide adequate sanitary community latrines – targeting the infrastructure deficit that sustained the practice. Yet, as the Supreme Court noted in Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (2023), essential provisions of both the 1993 and 2013 Acts remained unimplemented. The court issued 14 detailed directives to the Union and state governments, including comprehensive nationwide surveys, constitution of monitoring committees, scholarships for victims’ dependants, and legal services support through NALSA.

Enforcement challenges: why laws alone are not enough 🔗

The persistent gap between law and reality in the context of manual scavenging reflects several interconnected failures. First, the conditional and non-uniform application of the 1993 Act – where prohibition was triggered only by state government notification – allowed states to indefinitely delay enforcement. Second, rehabilitation was never adequately resourced. Without viable alternatives, workers had little practical means of exiting the occupation. Third, the sanitation sector remains largely unregulated, with local bodies relying extensively on informal and contract labour arrangements that fall outside the formal legal framework.

Activist Bezwada Wilson, a national convenor of Safai Karamchari Andolan, has consistently argued that the failure to implement the 1993 Act is a collective failure – of leadership, the judiciary, the administration, and Dalit movements – to address the concerns of the most marginalised community. Unlike infrastructure projects, manual scavenging receives little political priority, and deadlines for compliance have been continuously postponed. Indian Railways – historically one of the largest violators, with many train carriages discharging excreta directly onto tracks – has only gradually moved toward on-train treatment systems since 2018.

The biggest structural flaw acknowledged by the courts is that monitoring committees – mandated by both the 1993 and 2013 Acts at central, state, district, and sub-divisional levels – have often not been constituted or have remained non-functional. The Supreme Court in 2023 found that the Central Monitoring Committee under the Union Minister for Social Justice had not met in three years, and that the NCSK itself was short-staffed and non-functional in 2022-23.

Where the legislation stands today 🔗

As of 2023, 714 out of 766 districts across India have officially declared themselves free from manual scavenging. But courts and civil society continue to dispute these claims. The Bombay High Court recently directed the Maharashtra government to establish a social media platform for reporting manual scavenging incidents, after petitioners disputed the state’s claim of eradication by citing instances reported in 2024. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (Amendment) Bill, 2020 was introduced to further strengthen the law, but as of the last available information, it was still awaiting cabinet approval.

The legislative history of manual scavenging in India thus charts a slow, contested, and still-unfinished arc: from early administrative schemes in 1989, through the first central prohibition in 1993, to a strengthened law in 2013, and ongoing judicial supervision into the 2020s. The law has progressively grown stronger – broader in scope, higher in penalties, and more explicit in its rehabilitation mandate. What continues to lag is implementation: the will of state authorities to enforce prohibitions, the infrastructure to support sanitation workers in leaving the practice, and the social transformation necessary to break the caste logic that sustains it.

What do you think? Given that two comprehensive laws and multiple Supreme Court directions have failed to fully eradicate manual scavenging, should India explore a fundamentally different enforcement model – such as transferring oversight entirely to an independent constitutional authority rather than state governments? And does the continued use of informal and contract labour by municipalities to perform sewer-cleaning work suggest that the legal framework itself still leaves too many loopholes for the practice to persist under different names?

References

1. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/1581/1/199346.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_scavenging
3. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/6155772/
4. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/constitution-of-india/safai-karamchari-andolan-v-union-of-india-2014
5. https://lddashboard.legislative.gov.in/actsofparliamentfromtheyear/employment-manual-scavengers-and-construction-dry-latrines-prohibition
6. https://www.ielrc.org/content/a2102.pdf
7. https://sprf.in/prolonged-discrimination-legal-and-policy-failures-in-protecting-manual-scavengers/
8. https://ncsk.nic.in/
9. https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2026/01/14/manual-scavenging-india-legal-framework-implementation-gaps/
10. https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2023/10/26/supreme-court-directs-union-state-effective-implementation-laws-relating-to-manual-scavenging/
11. https://www.aicctu.org/workers-resistance/v1/workers-resistance-nov-2023/reading-supreme-court%E2%80%99s-directions-manual-scavenging-denial-government-must-stop-time-act-now
12. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/current-affairs/manual-scavenging