Scavengers belie India’s claim of ending caste-linked practice

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — Women who continue to clean human excreta by hand in parts of India have challenged the Hindu nationalist government’s claim that manual scavenging has been eliminated nationwide.

They say their continued work is living evidence that the outlawed and deeply caste-linked practice persists.

Women from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar, alongside sanitation workers from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, travelled to New Delhi on Sept. 1 to describe continuing manual scavenging, according to Maktoob Media.

Their testimonies directly contradict a recent government declaration in Parliament that every Indian district had been found free of manual scavengers.

“How can the government say there is no manual scavenging when we are still forced to clean dry latrines every day?” the women asked. “When are we going to get freedom from this untouchability and slavery?”

Manual scavenging refers to manually cleaning, carrying or disposing of human excreta from insanitary toilets, work historically imposed on India’s most marginalized caste communities.

India outlawed the practice, most recently under a 2013 law, but activists say caste discrimination, poverty and inadequate sanitation infrastructure have allowed it to survive.

Seventy-year-old Mussi Devi from Uttar Pradesh said she had spent her entire life cleaning human excreta and wanted to see the practice disappear before she died.

Anguri Bai from Madhya Pradesh said her mother-in-law introduced her to cleaning dry latrines after she married at 14 and that she continues doing the work. Chanjotiya Devi from Bihar said she began at 15 and wanted the practice eliminated so another generation would not inherit it.

Muzaffar Ahmed Sheikh said manual scavenging involving dry latrines also remained widespread but largely hidden in Kashmir because people feared speaking publicly about it.

Their testimonies came as the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), an organization campaigning against manual scavenging, launched its year-long INDIA @ 80 campaign demanding complete eradication of manual scavenging and dry latrines. 

The accounts contrast sharply with the government’s position. During Parliament’s recently concluded monsoon session, Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Ramdas Athawale said a 2024-25 survey had found no manual scavengers.

“All the districts of the country have completed the survey and declared themselves as manual scavengers’ free,” Athawale told lawmakers.

Yet the government itself identified 58,098 manual scavengers through earlier surveys conducted in 2013 and 2018.

SKA founder Bezwada Wilson said workers having to travel to the national capital to prove that manual scavenging still existed demonstrated what he described as a continuing casteist mindset.

“I started the fight when I was 16 years old and now I am 63 years old,” Wilson said. “Many things have changed, but manual scavenging in dry latrines still remains.”

SKA has also accused the government of undercounting sanitation-worker deaths, saying 593 workers died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between January 2021 and July 2026, compared with 332 deaths reported by the government to Parliament.

Despite legal prohibitions and repeated Supreme Court orders calling for mechanized sanitation, activists say India’s struggle to eradicate manual scavenging remains inseparable from the caste hierarchy that has forced generations of marginalized people into handling human waste.