The Historical Roots of Manual Scavenging in India

Manual scavenging – the practice of manually cleaning, carrying, or disposing of human excreta from dry latrines, open drains, and sewers – is not simply a sanitation problem. It is the physical expression of one of the world’s oldest and most rigid hierarchies. To understand why this practice exists, and why it has persisted for centuries despite legal prohibitions, you have to go back to where it began: the caste system of ancient India and its deeply entrenched idea of purity and pollution.

The caste system: A hierarchy of birth, not ability
Purity and pollution: The ideological engine
Who were the communities forced into this work?
How the British colonial period institutionalized the practice
Occupation as inheritance: The jagir system
Ambedkar’s critique: Structure, not sentiment
The legal response and its limits

The caste system: A hierarchy of birth, not ability

The caste system in India traces its origins to the early Vedic period, approximately 1500-500 BCE, when society was organized into four broad divisions called varnas: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders and merchants), and Shudras (labourers and servants). Each varna was further divided into thousands of jatis – hereditary sub-groups that dictated a person’s occupation, social status, and even who they could marry. Initially, this system may have been more fluid, organizing people by function rather than birth. Over centuries, however, it calcified into something much more oppressive: a rigid, inherited hierarchy where one’s social position at birth determined every aspect of their life.

Outside of this four-fold system were those known as “Untouchables” – groups pushed entirely beyond the boundaries of the ranked castes and assigned work considered so “polluting” that contact with them was believed to contaminate others. From a sociological perspective, this was not merely a labour arrangement – it was a manifestation of structural inequality, ritual hierarchy, and social exclusion. Manual scavenging sat at the very core of this exclusion.

Purity and pollution: The ideological engine

To grasp how manual scavenging became cemented as a caste-based occupation, one must understand the Brahmanical doctrine of purity and pollution. This worldview held that certain objects, acts, and people were inherently impure. Handling human waste was considered among the most defiling acts possible. Consequently, the task of disposing of excreta was assigned to those deemed intrinsically impure – those outside the varna hierarchy entirely.

Although the earliest Vedic texts do not explicitly mention manual scavenging, its ideological basis lies in post-Vedic Hindu scriptures such as the Manusmriti and the Narada Samhita, which codified notions of ritual purity and pollution, assigning “unclean” tasks like waste disposal to those placed at the bottom of the social order. The Naradiya Samhita enumerated fifteen duties of slaves, one of which was manual scavenging – suggesting that the practice was already recognized and assigned along lines of social subordination well before the Common Era. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution and himself a member of an untouchable community, traced manual scavenging as far back as 600 BCE.

The Manusmriti, compiled around the 2nd century CE, systematized this hierarchy with particular severity. All laws in Manu’s Code were caste-based, with the harshest punishments prescribed for Shudras and the lightest for Brahmins. The text structured Hindu social life around the premise that one’s birth determined one’s ritual status – and with it, one’s occupational duties. Those whose work involved “pollution” were not merely poor or disadvantaged; they were placed outside the moral and social community altogether. Untouchables were confined to the most degrading occupations – scavenging, removing dead animals, cleaning latrines – work that reinforced and perpetuated their “polluted” status in society.

Who were the communities forced into this work?

The most common Dalit caste performing sanitation work is the Valmiki (also known as Balmiki) community. This community, along with related sub-groups known regionally as Bhangi, Mehtar, Chuhra, Lalbegi, and Halalkhor, has historically been concentrated in states like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, and Gujarat. These communities are held at the bottom of the social hierarchy and face discrimination even from within the broader Dalit community – considered fit only for the most “polluting” labour.

The exact historical origin of these communities is contested. Some scholars link the institutionalization of sweeping and scavenging as a distinct hereditary profession to the rise of Muslim rule, when the cultural practice of purdah among women created a need for enclosed spaces for defecation, which in turn required people to clean and dispose of waste from those spaces. One theory holds that captured prisoners of war who could not be integrated into mainstream society formed these distinct hereditary groups. A 1992 Government of India study attributed the organized practice of manual scavenging to the Mughal era, when the need for privacy during bodily functions, particularly for women, necessitated designated spaces and consequently, the disposal of waste – tasks assigned to the lowest-ranked communities.

How the British colonial period institutionalized the practice

If the caste system created the ideological foundation for manual scavenging, British colonial administration entrenched it structurally. While the British by no means invented caste, they played a significant part in fixing caste identities into permanent administrative categories through the census system. By classifying every person into a caste and recording hereditary occupations, colonial authorities gave these boundaries a bureaucratic rigidity they had not always possessed.

Municipal bodies, the military, railway systems, civil tribunals, and industrial establishments specifically engaged individuals from the Valmiki or Mehtar communities for sanitation tasks. During the colonial period, Balmikis were brought from villages into cities to remove human excrement and clean urban areas, effectively transforming them into an urban sanitation underclass. The introduction of dry latrines – pit latrines without a water seal – across British-administered towns and cantonment areas formalized the demand for manual scavengers as a distinct labour category. Critically, after Independence, most Indians continued to use dry latrines, which were cleaned by Dalits, and the commissions set up to study the issue consistently recommended better conditions for sanitation workers rather than an end to the hereditary practice itself.

Occupation as inheritance: The jagir system

One of the most telling indicators of how deeply manual scavenging was embedded in caste society is the jagir or customary right system. A jagir “entitled” its holder to clean toilets in particular households in a village. Each family typically served between 10 and 30 households, and inheriting a greater number of households to clean was considered to increase the value of the inheritance. The 1966 Malkani Committee Report identified this customary right under various regional names – Gharagi, Jagirdari, Gharaki, Jijmani, Virat, and Dastoori.

This system reveals something important: manual scavenging was not experienced by those forced into it purely as oppression from outside. The practice was considered a customary right, and those who performed it received payment in kind – leftover food, grain at harvest, used clothing during festivals. The system created economic dependency that bound communities to the work across generations. Women, in particular, bore the overwhelming burden: women account for 95-98% of those forced into this practice in private and rural settings.

Ambedkar’s critique: Structure, not sentiment

The most rigorous intellectual challenge to the caste-based origins of manual scavenging came from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. While Mahatma Gandhi sought to morally elevate the work of sanitation by framing it as sacred service, Ambedkar criticized this romanticization, viewing manual scavenging as a product of structural caste oppression and advocating for its complete abolition through socioeconomic reforms and constitutional safeguards. For Ambedkar, the question was never about dignifying the work – it was about ending the system that made such work compulsory for particular communities by birth.

While caste has often been rationalized as a division of labour, Ambedkar argued it was instead a “division of laborers” – meaning that it was not work that defined a person’s caste, but rather one’s caste that defined the work they were compelled to do. This distinction is crucial for law students. It shifts the analysis from a labour question to a fundamental rights question: the denial of a person’s dignity and freedom based solely on birth.

This caste-based occupational segregation – what some scholars term “sanitation apartheid” – frames sanitation work as the hereditary duty of Dalits, rendering certain bodies disposable and their labour invisible. Ambedkar’s constitutional contributions – particularly Article 17, which abolishes untouchability, and Article 23, which prohibits forced labour – were designed to sever this historic link between caste and compelled work.

The legal response and its limits

India’s first formal legislative response came with The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, which prohibited the engagement or employment of manual scavengers and the construction of dry latrines. The law was later expanded through the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, which broadened the definition to include sewer and septic tank cleaning, and mandated rehabilitation and alternative employment. Despite these laws, manual scavenging was still reported across multiple states including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan well into the 2010s, and the NHRC observed in 2021 that the claimed eradication by state governments was far from reality.

The persistence of the practice despite legal prohibition underlines a central lesson: law alone cannot dismantle a practice that is sustained by social norms, economic dependency, and centuries of ideological justification. Addressing manual scavenging requires not only policy reform but a transformation of social relations – the elimination of caste-based labour as a concept. The historical roots of the practice make clear that what is needed is not merely better enforcement of existing laws, but a reckoning with the social prejudices that made those laws necessary in the first place.

What do you think? If the ideological justification for manual scavenging – purity, pollution, and hereditary duty – is rooted in centuries of caste doctrine, can legislative action alone be enough to eradicate it, or must legal reform be accompanied by something deeper? And given that the jagir system created economic dependency alongside social compulsion, what does an effective rehabilitation policy actually need to look like for communities who have known no other livelihood for generations?

References

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Table of Contents

The caste system: A hierarchy of birth, not ability 🔗

Purity and pollution: The ideological engine 🔗

Who were the communities forced into this work? 🔗

How the British colonial period institutionalized the practice 🔗

Occupation as inheritance: The jagir system 🔗

Ambedkar’s critique: Structure, not sentiment 🔗

The legal response and its limits 🔗