SAMAJ WEEKLY UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
India has a famous law that says manual scavenging is totally illegal. The law says it is a major crime to send a human being into a sewer or a septic tank without heavy protective gear.
But let’s be totally honest: this law is a complete lie. It is a paper tiger. It is not worth the paper it is written on. It is a fake shield used by the government to look civilized while letting poor people die.
The numbers don’t lie. Between February and June of 2026, more than 55 sanitation workers died inside toxic sewers and septic tanks across India. In June alone, 18 people died. Nine of them suffocated to death in Delhi, the nation’s capital. If the law was real, someone would be in jail for these deaths. But no one goes to jail. The bodies just keep piling up.
The law is nothing but a cruel smokescreen. It exists to protect the government’s reputation, not the workers’ lives.
The implementation is completely rotten. City governments do not want to buy expensive cleaning machines, so they quietly hire private contractors to do the dirty work. These contractors find poor, desperate men and send them down into dark, deep holes filled with human waste and deadly gases. The workers have no masks, no oxygen tanks, and no safety suits.
When a worker suffocates and dies in the muck, the government performs a disgusting trick. The city blames the contractor. The contractor runs away. The police refuse to help the grieving family. And the politicians call the death a “sad accident” instead of what it really is: murder by neglect.
Why does this keep happening? Because of the rotten caste system. Almost every single person who dies in these sewers is a Dalit or an Adivasi. The upper-caste politicians, the rich media bosses, and the middle-class public simply do not care. To them, Dalit lives are cheap and disposable.
Think for a moment that if 18 rich corporate CEOs or engineers were choking to death in human excrement every single month, the entire country would scream. The government would stop everything and fix the pipes with robots immediately. But because the victims are Dalits, the country is dead silent.
Even the 130-plus Dalit and Adivasi MPs in the Indian Parliament stay quiet because they care more about their political parties than the lives of their own people. The TV channels bury the news because watching a poor man die in a toilet tank does not make money or get views.
India’s anti-scavenging laws protect absolutely no one. They only protect corrupt officials and greedy contractors from going to prison. Until the people who run the cities are locked up for these deaths, these laws are just useless pieces of paper that give the state a license to let Dalit workers die in the dark.
Source:
Press Release by Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch (DASAM):
Sewer and Septic Tank Deaths Continue Unabated Across India:
Over 55 Sanitation Workers Dead Between February and June
2026, Including 18 Deaths in June and 9 in Delhi Alone
