The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 rests on a distinction that most public discussion of manual scavenging never makes, and the distinction decides almost everything that follows from the statute, including what the government is able to say about whether the practice survives. The Act prohibits two different things under two different definitions. The first is manual scavenging, defined by reference to insanitary latrines, open drains, pits and railway tracks. The second is hazardous cleaning, defined by reference to sewers and septic tanks cleaned by hand without protective gear, cleaning devices and safety precautions. Each prohibition carries its own penalty scale, its own enforcement history and, in the official record, its own count of the dead. Because the definitions are kept separate, the state can record more than a thousand deaths from the second practice across three decades while reporting, accurately on the words Parliament enacted, that no death has resulted from the first.

That is the fact a reader needs before any other in this field, and it is the answer this article is organised around. The statute, Act 25 of 2013, received the assent of the President on 18 September 2013 and was brought into force on 6 December 2013 by notification S.O. 2989(E) of 1 October 2013. It is an emancipatory statute in form as well as in intention: alongside the prohibitions it builds a complete machinery of survey, identification and rehabilitation, because Parliament accepted that a ban addressed only to employers would leave the people who performed the work exactly where the work had left them. The article that follows takes the statute apart in the order in which it operates. It explains what stood before it and why that failed, reads the two definitions with the care the counting question demands, sets out the prohibitions and penalties, follows the survey and rehabilitation machinery, describes the committees charged with watching all of it, and then gives the judicial record, in which the Supreme Court first fixed compensation for sewer deaths in 2014 and then, in October 2023, increased it and directed a fresh national survey. The closing sections state the government’s case and the critics’ case in their strongest forms and give a verdict on where the failure lies. The wider field of which this statute forms one part is mapped in the guide to social justice legislation in India, which places the Act among the equality code, the atrocities legislation and the reservation framework.

What stood before: the statute of 1993 and its limits

Parliament first prohibited this work in 1993, twenty years before the statute under discussion, and the earlier statute’s weaknesses are the surest guide to what the later one was trying to repair. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, Act 46 of 1993, prohibited the employment of manual scavengers and the construction of dry latrines, and it was made on a constitutional route that limited it from birth. Sanitation and public health sit in the State List of the Seventh Schedule, so Parliament legislated under Article 252 of the Constitution on the strength of resolutions passed by state legislatures asking it to do so. The Act accordingly applied, in the first instance, to Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tripura and West Bengal and to the Union territories, and it reached other States only if and when their legislatures adopted it by resolution. It was brought into force on 26 January 1997, more than three years after its enactment, and a substantial part of the country stood outside its effective reach for long periods, either because the State had not adopted it or because the State maintained that no manual scavengers existed within its borders and therefore there was nothing to adopt it for.

The substance was as thin as the coverage. The 1993 Act prohibited two things, employment of a manual scavenger and construction of a dry latrine, and it attached to every contravention a single penalty under its Section 14: imprisonment for a term which could extend to one year, or a fine which could extend to two thousand rupees, or both, with a further fine of one hundred rupees for each day a contravention continued after conviction. It contained no definition addressed to sewers or septic tanks at all, so the work that was already killing people in underground spaces stood outside its text. It contained no rehabilitation chapter: a person released from the work was released into nothing, with no statutory claim to cash assistance, training, housing support or credit, and the liberation schemes that governments ran alongside the Act were executive programmes that could be, and were, wound down or renamed without legal consequence. And it depended for enforcement on the same local bodies whose establishments employed much of the labour in question. The preamble to the 2013 Act records the conclusion Parliament drew from this record, in terms that repay attention because recitals of this frankness are rare: the dehumanising practice, it says, arises from the continuing existence of insanitary latrines and a highly iniquitous caste system, and the existing laws have not proved adequate in eliminating the twin evils of insanitary latrines and manual scavenging.

The evidence available to Parliament as it legislated in 2013 showed the scale of what the earlier prohibition had not touched. The Census of 2011 counted 794,390 latrines in the country where human excreta was cleaned by hand, within a larger stock of roughly 26 lakh insanitary latrines, of which 13,14,652 flushed excreta into open drains. The Socio Economic and Caste Census of the same year recorded 182,505 households in rural India alone with at least one member whose work was manual scavenging. These were official counts, produced by the state’s own enumerators, of a practice that had been a criminal offence in the adopting States for fourteen years by then. The lesson the drafters of the 2013 statute drew was not merely that penalties needed raising. It was that a prohibition statute had to do four things the 1993 Act had not attempted: define the work precisely, attach the prohibition to the physical object that generated it, which is the insanitary latrine, build the identification and rehabilitation machinery into the statute itself rather than leaving it to schemes, and create a monitoring architecture with named bodies at district, state and central level. Whether the 2013 Act’s own definitions then created a new problem, of a kind the 1993 Act never had the precision to create, is the question the middle of this article takes up.

The making of the 2013 Act

The statute that emerged from this failure was drafted in a different ministry and from a different premise. The 1993 Act had been administered as a sanitation measure, concerned with latrines and their conversion. The Bill of 2012 was prepared in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and framed as a rights and rehabilitation measure, concerned in the first place with the persons who did the work. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, Bill No. 96 of 2012, was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 3 September 2012 by the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, Mukul Wasnik, who told the House that despite the concerted efforts made in the past to eliminate the dehumanising practice, it persisted in various parts of the country, and that existing laws had proved inadequate. The Bill was referred to the Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, which submitted its report in March 2013, and Parliament passed the Bill in September 2013; the President’s assent followed on 18 September 2013. A contrast drawn repeatedly during the Bill’s passage marks the distance travelled from 1993: the new law was not constructed on state resolutions and would not wait on adoption by States, as the 1993 Act had done through Article 252, but would operate as a parliamentary statute across the country it extended to, with the state-facing machinery of surveys, committees and reports built into its own chapters rather than left to state initiative.

The campaign that stood behind the Bill is part of its drafting history and explains several of its choices. The Safai Karamchari Andolan had moved the Supreme Court in 2003, and the pendency of that petition, with the Court monitoring the Union and the States on the practice over a decade, formed the institutional background against which the Bill was written; the Court had occasion, while the Bill was pending, to pull up the government for the delay in passing it. The rehabilitation chapter, the vigilance committees and the National Commission’s statutory functions all bear the marks of demands that had been pressed in that litigation and in the movement’s work among the workers themselves. The Bill’s most contested design choices were visible from introduction. Contemporary reporting of the Bill noted both its strengths against the 1993 Act, a wider definition reaching open drains, pits and railway tracks, express identification provisions, more stringent penalties and committees at sub-division, district, state and central levels, and the features that drew criticism from organisations in the field, among them the retention of the complaint-based prosecution with a three-month window and the dependence of the whole identification edifice on the local bodies whose record was the problem. Both readings were available in 2012, and the Act as enacted kept the features that each side had identified, which is why the enforcement debate of the following decade was, in outline, predictable from the text.

One further feature of the passage deserves record because it recurs in the monitoring story. The Act was brought into force not on assent but on an appointed day, 6 December 2013, notified on 1 October 2013 under Section 1(3), whose proviso required that the appointed date not be earlier than sixty days after publication of the notification. Commencement was therefore a deliberate executive act taken ten weeks after assent, and several of the Act’s internal clocks, the two months for the latrine survey, the six and nine months for conversion and demolition, the one year within which States had to notify the hazardous cleaning prohibition, run from that December date. The statute’s first year was consumed by these clocks, and the first survey under it was conducted in 2013 and 2014 against a commencement that had only just occurred, a sequencing that forms part of the background to the Supreme Court’s later refusal to accept that survey as a survey under the Act.

The constitutional frame the statute recites

The 2013 Act opens with recitals that locate it in Part III of the Constitution, and the location matters because the Supreme Court later read the statute through them. The preamble recites that fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual is a goal of the Preamble to the Constitution, that the right to live with dignity is implicit in the fundamental rights, and that Article 46 obliges the State to protect the weaker sections, and particularly the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, from social injustice and all forms of exploitation. It then states the Act’s purpose as correcting the historical injustice and indignity suffered by manual scavengers and rehabilitating them to a life of dignity. Behind the recitals stand the operative articles the Court would invoke. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form, and the enforcement of a disability arising out of untouchability is an offence punishable by law, the command under which the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 was enacted. Article 23 prohibits traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced labour, and makes the prohibition enforceable against private persons as well as the State, which is the feature that lets it reach an employer or a contractor. Article 15(2) opens wells, tanks, bathing ghats and places of public resort to all citizens, and Article 24 forbids the employment of children in hazardous work. In Dr Balram Singh v Union of India, decided in October 2023, a bench of S. Ravindra Bhat and Aravind Kumar JJ treated Articles 15, 17, 23 and 24 as forming, in the amicus curiae’s phrase adopted in the argument the Court recorded, an emancipatory code, and read the 2013 Act as a manifestation of it. The Court held that the Act is not a regular statute but an emancipatory one, and that reading governs how its survey and rehabilitation provisions are to be construed: as entitlements of the persons concerned, not as administrative favours.

One further provision of the Act deserves notice at this stage because it decides the relationship between the two statutes. Section 3 gives the 2013 Act overriding effect, providing that its provisions operate notwithstanding anything inconsistent contained in the 1993 Act or in any other law. What the 2013 Act does not contain, anywhere in its thirty-nine sections, is a repeal of the 1993 Act. The older statute was never struck off the book; it was overridden where the two conflict. The distinction is not a pedant’s point. When Dr Balram Singh petitioned the Supreme Court in 2020, the prayer was for implementation of both Acts, and the Court’s judgment addresses the implementation of the provisions of the 2013 Act and of the 1993 Act together. A reader who says that the 2013 Act repealed and replaced the Act of 1993 states the practical effect loosely and the legal position wrongly, and in a field where the whole argument turns on reading text exactly, the loose statement is worth correcting at the outset.

How the Act is arranged

The Act has thirty-nine sections in eight chapters, and the arrangement is itself an argument about how eradication was supposed to happen. Chapter I contains the short title, extent and commencement provisions, the definitions in Section 2, and the overriding effect in Section 3. The extent clause as enacted carried the statute to the whole of India except the State of Jammu and Kashmir, a limitation that reflected the constitutional position of that State at the time and that ceased to matter when the constitutional arrangements for Jammu and Kashmir were reorganised in 2019, the central statute book being extended to the successor Union territories by the reorganisation legislation of that year. Chapter II, a single section, requires local authorities to survey insanitary latrines and provide sanitary community latrines, which places the physical object before the prohibition that follows. Chapter III contains the prohibitions and penalties: Section 5 prohibits insanitary latrines and the engagement of manual scavengers, Section 6 voids contracts, Section 7 prohibits hazardous cleaning, Sections 8 and 9 punish the two prohibitions at different levels, and Section 10 limits the time within which a prosecution may be set in motion. Chapter IV, Sections 11 to 16, is the identification and rehabilitation code, running one track for urban areas through Municipalities and a parallel track for rural areas through Panchayats. Chapter V names the implementing authorities, from the local authority and the District Magistrate to the inspectors appointed under Section 20. Chapter VI governs trial: offences are to be tried by an Executive Magistrate invested with the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class, may be tried summarily, and are by Section 22 cognizable and non-bailable. Chapter VII builds the vigilance and monitoring committees at district, sub-division, state and central level and assigns functions to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis. Chapter VIII closes with the duty to use modern technology for cleaning sewers, protection for action taken in good faith, a bar on civil court jurisdiction, rule-making powers, a power to remove difficulties and a power to exempt.

Two features of the arrangement deserve emphasis before the detail. The first is that the Act is addressed as much to the state as to the private employer. The duties to survey, to demolish or convert, to identify, to rehabilitate, to constitute committees and to report fall on local authorities, District Magistrates, State Governments and the Central Government, and the definition of local authority is drawn to catch every kind of public sanitation body: a Municipality or a Panchayat responsible for sanitation in its area, a Cantonment Board constituted under the Cantonments Act, 2006, and a railway authority. The second is the division of governmental responsibility in the definition of appropriate government. For Cantonment Boards, railway lands and lands and buildings owned by the Central Government, a central public sector undertaking or a substantially funded autonomous body, the appropriate government is the Central Government; in all other cases it is the State Government. The statute thereby assigns the two largest public employers of sanitation labour on central lands, the railways and the defence estates, to the Centre’s account, and the municipal field to the States.

How does the Act deal with the railways and the cantonment boards?

The Act counts a Cantonment Board and a railway authority as local authorities, makes the Central Government the appropriate government for railway lands and cantonment areas, requires railway representation on district vigilance committees, and carves out the water flush latrine in a railway passenger coach, which is not insanitary when cleaned with notified devices and protective gear.

The railway provisions repay a closer look because the railway track is named in the definition of manual scavenger itself. A person who handles human excreta on a railway track, before it fully decomposes, falls within the definition, and the Railways were for years the most visible single site of the practice, since excreta from train toilets fell directly on the tracks at stations and was removed by hand. The proviso to the definition of insanitary latrine addresses the coach rather than the track: a water flush latrine in a railway passenger coach, when cleaned by an employee with the help of such devices and using such protective gear as the Central Government may notify, is not deemed to be an insanitary latrine. In the Balram Singh proceedings the Railways placed on record that notifications of June and October 2014, which had stipulated that persons cleaning sanitary latrines in passenger coaches and on tracks would not attract the Act’s prohibitions if provided with basic equipment such as face masks, gloves, boots and brooms, were withdrawn by an order of 26 April 2023, and that a model contract for outsourced cleaning services mandating mechanised processes and safety equipment had been released. The Railways also recorded the installation of 2,99,880 bio-toilets in 84,402 coaches as on 31 March 2023, a figure the Court reproduced from the affidavit. Bio-toilets matter legally and not only operationally, because a toilet whose waste is retained and treated in a tank below the coach discharges nothing onto the track, and the definitional trigger for manual scavenging on railway land falls away with the discharge.

The first definition: manual scavenger and insanitary latrine

Section 2(1)(g) defines a manual scavenger as a person engaged or employed, at the commencement of the Act or at any time thereafter, by an individual or a local authority or an agency or a contractor, for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit into which the human excreta from the insanitary latrines is disposed of, or on a railway track or in such other spaces or premises as the Central Government or a State Government may notify, before the excreta fully decomposes in such manner as may be prescribed. Every element of that sentence does work. The engagement may be by anyone: an individual householder, a local authority, an agency or a contractor, and the Explanation to the clause provides that engaged or employed means engaged or employed on a regular or contract basis, which closes at the definitional stage the escape route of describing the worker as casual or contractual. The handling may be of any kind: cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any manner. The places are enumerated: an insanitary latrine, an open drain or pit receiving excreta from insanitary latrines, a railway track, and any other space or premises the Centre or a State notifies. And the handling must occur before the excreta fully decomposes, which is the element that separates this work from the handling of treated waste.

The counterpart definition is the insanitary latrine in Section 2(1)(e): a latrine which requires human excreta to be cleaned or otherwise handled manually, either in situ, or in an open drain or pit into which the excreta is discharged or flushed out, before the excreta fully decomposes in such manner as may be prescribed. The two definitions are locked together. The latrine is insanitary because it requires manual handling; the worker is a manual scavenger because the handling is of excreta from such a latrine or from the drains and pits that serve it. It follows that the statutory route to ending manual scavenging as defined is the elimination of the object: convert or demolish the latrine and the defined occupation loses its site, which is why Chapter II and the first half of Chapter III are addressed to latrines rather than to persons.

The Explanation to the manual scavenger definition then introduces the qualification on which a great deal of practice turns. A person engaged or employed to clean excreta with the help of such devices and using such protective gear as the Central Government may notify in this behalf shall not be deemed to be a manual scavenger. Protective equipment, in other words, does not merely mitigate the work; on the definitional plane it can take the worker outside the protected category altogether, with consequences that run in two directions at once. A genuinely equipped worker is safer, which is the point of the carve-out. But a worker reclassified by the issue of gloves and a device is also a worker who no longer counts for survey, identification or rehabilitation purposes, and whose employer no longer commits the Section 5 offence by engaging him. The carve-out is therefore one of the places where the definitional architecture can be operated in good faith, as a safety standard, or worked as a counting device, and the reader should hold both possibilities in view when the identification figures are examined later in this article.

The second definition: hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks

Section 2(1)(d) defines hazardous cleaning by an employee, in relation to a sewer or a septic tank, as its manual cleaning by such employee without the employer fulfilling his obligations to provide protective gear and other cleaning devices and ensuring observance of safety precautions, as may be prescribed or provided in any other law for the time being in force or rules made under it. A sewer is defined as an underground conduit or pipe for carrying off human excreta besides other waste matter and drainage wastes, and a septic tank as a water-tight settling tank or chamber, normally located underground, used to receive and hold human excreta and allow it to decompose through bacterial activity. The definition of hazardous cleaning is structured differently from the definition of manual scavenger, and the difference is the hinge of the whole statute. Manual scavenger is defined by what the worker does and where. Hazardous cleaning is defined by what the employer fails to do. The same physical act, a person cleaning a sewer by hand, is hazardous cleaning when the employer has not provided the prescribed gear, devices and precautions, and is not hazardous cleaning when the employer has. The wrong the definition captures is therefore located in the employer’s default, and the prohibition in Section 7 is addressed to the person, local authority or agency that engages or employs anyone for such cleaning.

The content of the employer’s obligations is supplied by the rules. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Rules, 2013, made under the Act, prescribe the protective gear and cleaning devices that must be provided and the safety precautions to be observed for manual cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, and Rules 3 and 5 of those Rules were the provisions through which the Supreme Court examined mechanisation in the Balram Singh judgment. The Court’s treatment of the gear question went beyond the rules. Reading the 2013 Act with Article 23 of the Constitution, the bench held that where minimum protective gear and cleaning devices are not provided to hazardous workers, the employment of those workers amounts to forced labour and is prohibited under the Constitution, that the provisions for gear and devices are not mere statutory rights but entitlements, and that a contract for the employment of a hazardous cleaner without gear and devices would violate Article 23 even if it were voluntary, because such an agreement offends human dignity. That holding is the single most consequential piece of judicial construction the statute has received, because it lifts the gear obligation out of the rule book and into the Constitution: an employer cannot answer a charge by pointing to a signed consent form or a wage premium, since the worker’s agreement does not cure the violation.

Why does the statute keep manual scavenging and hazardous cleaning in separate definitions?

Parliament defined the two practices by different tests because they present different wrongs: manual scavenging is defined by the place and the material handled, a latrine, drain, pit or track and undecomposed excreta, while hazardous cleaning is defined by the employer’s failure to provide protective gear, cleaning devices and safety precautions for sewer and septic tank work.

The separation was not accidental drafting. The two practices had different histories in the law: the 1993 Act had been written against the dry latrine and said nothing about sewers, so a statute that simply widened the old definition would have carried the old blind spot into the new law. They also attract different remedies in the statutory scheme. Manual scavenging is met with elimination of its object and rehabilitation of its identified workers. Hazardous cleaning is met with a conditional prohibition that bites where the employer’s safety obligations are unmet, and with a duty, imposed by Section 33, on every local authority and agency to use appropriate technological appliances for cleaning sewers, septic tanks and other spaces within its control, with a view to eliminating the need for manual handling of excreta in the process. The costs of the separation appear in the counting, and they are real. The benefits, in precision about what exactly is forbidden and who exactly has defaulted, are also real, and an honest reading of the statute has to keep both in view rather than treating the two definitions as a drafting error.

The prohibitions

Chapter II and Chapter III together build a sequence that begins with the latrine and ends with the offence. Section 4 requires every local authority to carry out a survey of insanitary latrines within its jurisdiction and publish a list of them within two months of the Act’s commencement. Within fifteen days of the list’s publication, the authority must give notice to the occupier to demolish the insanitary latrine or convert it into a sanitary latrine within six months of commencement, a period the authority may extend by not more than three months for sufficient reasons recorded in writing. The authority must also construct, within nine months of commencement, such number of sanitary community latrines as it considers necessary in the areas where insanitary latrines have been found, and Municipalities, Cantonment Boards and railway authorities must additionally construct an adequate number of sanitary community latrines within a period not exceeding three years, as the appropriate government notifies, so as to eliminate open defecation in their jurisdiction, and arrange for the hygienic upkeep of the community latrines at all times.

Section 5 then states the prohibition at the centre of the Act. Notwithstanding anything inconsistent in the 1993 Act, no person, local authority or agency shall, after the date of commencement, construct an insanitary latrine, or engage or employ, directly or indirectly, a manual scavenger. Every person so engaged or employed stands discharged immediately from any obligation, express or implied, to do manual scavenging, a discharge that operates by force of the statute and does not wait on any order. Every insanitary latrine existing at commencement must be demolished or converted into a sanitary latrine by the occupier at the occupier’s own cost before the expiry of the period specified under Section 4. Where there are several occupiers, the liability lies with the owner if one of the occupiers is the owner, and on all the occupiers jointly and severally in every other case. The State Government may give assistance for conversion to occupiers of specified categories and on a specified scale, but the Act adds, in a second proviso that closes a familiar line of defence, that non-receipt of state assistance is not a valid ground to maintain or use an insanitary latrine beyond the period of nine months. If the occupier fails to demolish or convert within the period, the local authority must, after giving not less than twenty-one days’ notice, convert or demolish the latrine itself and recover the cost from the occupier in the prescribed manner. Section 17 reinforces the scheme by making it the responsibility of every local authority, notwithstanding anything in any other law, to ensure that after nine months from commencement no insanitary latrine is constructed, maintained or used within its jurisdiction, and that action is taken against a defaulting occupier.

Section 6 deals with the contracts that the prohibition displaces. Any contract, agreement or other instrument entered into before commencement, engaging or employing a person for manual scavenging, stands terminated on commencement, is void and inoperative, and no compensation is payable for its termination. The voidness is unqualified, and it matters beyond the immediate parties, because a contractor who claims a subsisting right to deploy workers under an older agreement is answered by the section itself. But the same section protects the worker against the consequence an employer might otherwise draw. A person employed or engaged as a manual scavenger on a full-time basis shall not be retrenched by the employer; the person is to be retained, subject to willingness, in employment on at least the same emoluments, and assigned work other than manual scavenging. The prohibition therefore falls on the task and not on the livelihood of the person who performed it, at least where the engagement was full-time, and the distinction between full-time employees, who carry the retention right, and contract or casual workers, who do not, is one of the structural features of the Act that the enforcement record exposes.

Section 7 states the second prohibition in different and deliberately phased terms. No person, local authority or agency shall, from such date as the State Government may notify, which shall not be later than one year from the date of commencement of the Act, engage or employ, directly or indirectly, any person for hazardous cleaning of a sewer or a septic tank. The asymmetry between the two prohibitions is instructive. The manual scavenging prohibition in Section 5 operates from commencement. The hazardous cleaning prohibition was given up to a year to arrive, State by State, on notification, reflecting the drafters’ acceptance that sewer and septic tank cleaning could not be mechanised or reorganised overnight. The consequence is that the date from which the graver offence could be committed in a given State depends on that State’s notification, a detail that prosecutions must establish and that summaries of the Act routinely omit.

The penalties and the trial machinery

The Act punishes the two prohibitions on different scales, and the scales are the clearest textual evidence that Parliament regarded the second practice as the more dangerous of the two. Section 8 punishes contravention of Section 5 or Section 6: for the first contravention, imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or a fine which may extend to fifty thousand rupees, or both; for any subsequent contravention, imprisonment which may extend to two years, or a fine which may extend to one lakh rupees, or both. Section 9 punishes contravention of Section 7: for the first contravention, imprisonment which may extend to two years, or a fine which may extend to two lakh rupees, or both; for any subsequent contravention, imprisonment which may extend to five years, or a fine which may extend to five lakh rupees, or both. Set against the 1993 Act, under which a single scale of one year and two thousand rupees covered everything the statute reached and much of the field stood outside it, the 2013 scales represent a multiplication of the maximum fine for a first manual scavenging offence by twenty-five times and the creation of a five-year maximum for the repeat hazardous cleaning offence that the earlier law could not have imposed because it did not define the conduct.

Three procedural provisions then qualify the apparent strength of those scales, and a reader assessing the Act’s enforcement design must hold them together. Section 10 bars cognizance of any offence punishable under the Act except upon a complaint made by a person in this behalf within three months from the date of the occurrence of the alleged commission of the offence. A three-month window is short for any offence and exceptionally short for offences whose victims are workers dependent on the very employer or local authority against whom the complaint would run; a death or an engagement that comes to light through a survey, a news report or a commission’s inquiry months later may already be outside it. Section 21 provides that the State Government may confer on an Executive Magistrate the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class for the trial of offences under the Act, and that an offence may be tried summarily. Section 22 provides that notwithstanding anything in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, every offence under the Act shall be cognizable and non-bailable, which arms the police to arrest without warrant and makes bail discretionary rather than a right. The combination is unusual and cuts in two directions. On paper the offences are treated with a severity that the cognizable and non-bailable classification signals. In structure the prosecution must be launched by complaint, within three months, before a magistrate drawn from the executive, in a district where the District Magistrate who chairs the vigilance committee is also the officer charged by Section 19 with ensuring that offenders are investigated and prosecuted. Whether that combination explains part of the prosecution record examined later in this article is a question on which the government’s account and the critics’ account divide, and both are given below.

Section 23 completes the liability picture by addressing offences by companies, a term the section defines to include a firm or other association of individuals. Where an offence has been committed by a company, every person who at the time of the offence was in charge of, and responsible to, the company for the conduct of its business, as well as the company itself, is deemed guilty and liable to be proceeded against and punished. Where the offence is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other officer, that officer is likewise deemed guilty. The section is the Act’s answer, on its face, to the contracting structure of sanitation work, in which the entity that wins the municipal contract, the entity that supplies the labour and the individual who sends a worker into a sewer are three different persons. How far that answer reaches in practice depends on proof of who was in charge of the business and on the attribution of consent, connivance or neglect, which are exactly the links that subcontracting chains are arranged to obscure.

What counts as an offence by a company under the Act, and who is prosecuted?

Where a company commits an offence, Section 23 deems both the company and every person who was in charge of and responsible for the conduct of its business at the time to be guilty, and it extends the same deemed guilt to any director, manager, secretary or other officer whose consent, connivance or neglect the offence is proved to involve.

The deemed-guilt structure is the standard Indian regulatory pattern, and its limits are known from every field in which it operates. It works where the accused company is a real organisation with identifiable officers and records. It works badly where the contractor is a thin intermediary, where the labour was supplied through a further subcontract the principal never documented, or where the work was ordered orally by a site supervisor whose position in the company’s hierarchy is itself in dispute. The Balram Singh directions addressed the same gap from the civil side, directing that accountability for deaths in contractual or outsourced work take the form of cancellation of the contract forthwith and imposition of monetary liability, and that the Union devise a model contract, for use by its agencies and by all States and Union Territories, under which the standards of the 2013 Act and the rules must be strictly followed and a mishap costs the agency its contract and possibly blacklisting. The direction anchors the model in the enactments that govern such engagements, naming the Contract Labour Act, 1970 as the framework whose standards the contract must carry into sanitation work. The criminal route and the contract route are complements; the record suggests the second has been easier to move than the first.

The safety architecture in the Rules

The Act states the employer’s obligations in the language of definition, and the Rules of 2013 supply the working content, which is where an employer or a local authority must look to know what compliance consists of. The Rules prescribe the protective gear and other cleaning devices to be provided to a person engaged for cleaning a sewer or a septic tank, and the safety precautions to be observed in such cleaning, and the Supreme Court examined Rules 3 and 5 in the Balram Singh judgment in the course of its discussion of mechanisation through cleaning devices and protective gear. The design premise of the Rules is that manual cleaning of a sewer or septic tank, where it occurs at all, is an industrial operation requiring equipment, preparation and supervision, and not an extension of sweeping: the gear and devices are prescribed because the hazards of the space, toxic gases, oxygen deficiency, and the risk of collapse and infection, are hazards that clothing alone does not answer. Section 33 of the Act states the corresponding systemic duty, that every local authority and other agency shall use appropriate technological appliances for cleaning sewers, septic tanks and other spaces within its control with a view to eliminating the need for manual handling of excreta in the process of cleaning. The trajectory of the scheme is therefore from gear, to devices, to machines, and the 2023 direction that outsourced sewer work must not require a person to enter a sewer for any purpose whatsoever is the judicial completion of that trajectory: entry itself, and not merely ungeared entry, is what the direction removes, although the statutory prohibition in Section 7 continues to be defined by the employer’s default in providing gear, devices and precautions, so that a gap persists between the text of the offence and the standard the Court has directed governments to reach.

The proceedings also recorded the administrative machinery proposed for the gap: it was submitted on behalf of the respondents that the Court might direct measures including the establishment of an Emergency Response Sanitation Unit and a Responsible Sanitation Authority in each district, a helpline, assurance of mechanised cleaning methods, and the availability of essential safety equipment and machines at the unit, within six months. These were proposals placed before the Court rather than directions it issued, and the distinction matters for a reader tracing what is obligatory. What the Court did direct, within the fourteen directions, was the accountability mechanism, the model contract, the national survey and the portal and dashboard; the unit-based response system remains a model the executive has commended to itself in court, and its adoption district by district is a matter of administrative record rather than of legal command.

The provisions at work: four applications

Definitions earn their keep in application, and three situations, stated as illustrations of how the provisions engage rather than as reports of decided cases, show the machinery operating. Take first a householder in a town whose dry latrine is cleaned each morning by a worker engaged informally through a neighbour, for cash, with no written arrangement of any kind. The latrine is an insanitary latrine within Section 2(1)(e), because it requires human excreta to be handled manually in situ before it decomposes. The worker is a manual scavenger within Section 2(1)(g), engaged by an individual, and the Explanation’s inclusion of engagement on a contract basis is not even needed, since the clause reaches engagement by an individual directly. The householder, as occupier, is in breach of Section 5 from commencement, is liable under Section 5(2) to demolish or convert the latrine at his own cost within the Section 4 period, and faces the local authority’s power to convert or demolish after twenty-one days’ notice and recover the cost. The worker, for her part, stands discharged by the statute from any obligation to do the work, may apply under Section 12 to be identified whether or not a survey is running, and on inclusion in the final list acquires the Section 13 entitlements against the District Magistrate’s responsibility. The informality of the engagement, which in ordinary labour law would be the worker’s weakness, is legally irrelevant at every step.

Take, second, a municipal contractor whose gang is sent to clear a blocked septic tank at a school, the workers entering the tank with a rope and a bucket and no breathing apparatus, no protective clothing beyond what they wear, and no testing of the atmosphere inside. If a worker dies, the engagement is hazardous cleaning within Section 2(1)(d), because the employer did not fulfil the obligations to provide protective gear and cleaning devices and ensure observance of prescribed safety precautions, and the contractor’s engagement of the worker contravenes Section 7, punishable under Section 9 with imprisonment up to two years or a fine up to two lakh rupees on a first contravention. The municipality’s position is not that of a bystander: it is a local authority within the Act, the work was its sanitation function discharged through an agency, a term Section 2(1)(a) defines to include a contractor, and the Balram Singh accountability direction is aimed at exactly this configuration, requiring cancellation of the contract and monetary liability, and requiring that outsourced work not demand sewer entry at all. The family’s compensation entitlement runs on the judicial track: thirty lakh rupees under the 2023 direction, payable by the responsible agency, with the National Legal Services Authority’s models for disbursement and the dashboard direction intended to make the payment visible. The criminal case, by contrast, must be set in motion by a complaint within three months of the occurrence under Section 10, in a district whose District Magistrate has the Section 19 duty to ensure investigation and prosecution of Section 7 contraventions, and the case will be tried by an Executive Magistrate invested with first-class judicial powers. Every element of that sentence identifies a point at which the case can, and in the recorded pattern generally does, fail to begin.

Take, third, the borderline the definitions deliberately draw: a worker employed by a railway contractor to clean the toilet of a stationary passenger coach, using the devices and wearing the protective gear the Central Government has notified for the purpose. The proviso to Section 2(1)(e) provides that a water flush latrine in a railway passenger coach, when cleaned by an employee with the help of such devices and using such protective gear, is not deemed to be an insanitary latrine, and the Explanation to Section 2(1)(g) provides that a person cleaning excreta with notified devices and gear is not deemed to be a manual scavenger. The work is lawful under the Act, and the worker has no claim to identification or rehabilitation under it. Change one fact, the same worker sent to clear excreta from the track below the coach by hand, and the definition is engaged in full, because the railway track is named in the clause and no proviso covers it. The pair of cases shows the statute working as designed at its boundary: the line it draws is not between clean work and dirty work, or between safe work and dangerous work in any general sense, but between work done with the notified equipment the law prescribes and work done without it, and between the places the definition names and the places it does not. Everything in the counting controversy follows from officials and readers sliding across that line in one direction or the other.

A fourth application completes the set, because it is the one most likely to arise in an ordinary residential setting. A housing society engages a local contractor, as societies routinely do, to empty and clean the septic tank serving its buildings, and the contractor sends two workers into the tank with no equipment beyond a rope. The society is an occupier and, through its managing committee, an owner or part-owner of the premises within the Act’s definitions of occupier and owner in Sections 2(1)(j) and 2(1)(k). The contractor is an agency within Section 2(1)(a), a definition that expressly includes a contractor and a firm or company engaged in the development and maintenance of real estate. The engagement is for hazardous cleaning if the employer’s obligations as to gear, devices and precautions are unmet, the prohibition of Section 7 binds any person and any agency, and the offence is complete on the engagement, whether or not anyone is hurt. The society’s committee members who authorised the engagement face the question the Act’s structure poses in every setting: not whether they intended the workers to be unprotected, but whether the engagement they set in motion was one the statute forbids. Private, small-scale and informal engagements of this kind are the least visible part of the field and the least likely to appear in any official count, which is one more reason the counts in this article are treated throughout as records of what the system has seen rather than measures of what exists.

Identification: the survey machinery

Rehabilitation under the Act is gated by identification, and identification is gated by the survey, which is why the survey sections carry more practical weight than any other part of Chapter IV. Section 11 provides that if a Municipality has reason to believe that some persons are engaged or employed in manual scavenging within its jurisdiction, the Chief Executive Officer shall cause a survey to be undertaken to identify them. The content and methodology of the survey are as prescribed, and it must be completed within two months of its commencement in the case of Municipal Corporations and within one month in the case of other Municipalities, with the Chief Executive Officer responsible for its accurate and timely completion. On completion, the Chief Executive Officer must draw up a provisional list of persons found to be working as manual scavengers and fulfilling the prescribed eligibility conditions, publish it for general information in the prescribed manner, and invite objections from the general public. Any person may object to the inclusion or exclusion of any name within fifteen days of publication. The objections are enquired into, and a final list of persons found to be working as manual scavengers within the local limits of the Municipality is then published. On publication of the final list, the persons included in it stand discharged, subject to the full-time retention protection of Section 6, from any obligation to work as manual scavengers. Sections 14, 15 and 16 run the same machinery in rural areas through Panchayats, applying Sections 11, 12 and 13 with the necessary changes.

Section 12 provides the route that does not depend on the Municipality’s initiative, and its existence is an admission written into the Act that official surveys miss people. Any person working as a manual scavenger in an urban area may, during a survey or at any time after it, apply to the Chief Executive Officer, or to an authorised officer, in the prescribed manner, to be identified as a manual scavenger. The application must be enquired into, as part of the survey if one is in progress or within fifteen days of receipt if none is, and if it is found to be true, the applicant’s name is added to the final list and the consequences of inclusion follow. The Rules of 2013 fill in the survey’s working method under Rule 11: State Level Survey Committees and District Level Survey Committees carry out campaigns in areas where insanitary latrines have been found, local authorities are to work with community leaders and non-governmental organisations active in the field, self-declaration by manual scavengers is provided for, non-governmental organisations may submit lists for verification, a house-to-house survey is mandated to identify those who service insanitary latrines in an area, and overseers are appointed to check the correctness of the data collected. On paper the machinery has three independent entry points: the authority’s own enumeration, the worker’s application, and the lists of organisations working among the workers. The distance between that design and what the surveys produced is one of the best documented failures in the Act’s record.

Why do the official counts of manual scavengers differ so sharply between exercises?

The counts differ because each exercise counted a different thing by a different method: the Census of 2011 counted latrines and households, recording 794,390 latrines cleaned by hand and 182,505 rural households with a member in the work, while the statutory surveys counted only persons whom local bodies verified as eligible, and returned figures in the tens of thousands.

The sequence of identification figures shows the machinery narrowing at each stage. The first surveys under the Act identified 12,742 manual scavengers in thirteen States, a figure the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment placed before the Lok Sabha in April 2017 together with the position that 11,598 of them, ninety-one per cent, had received one-time cash assistance of 40,000 rupees. The National Survey of 2018, conducted through the National Safai Karamcharis Finance and Development Corporation, identified 58,098 manual scavengers, and that became the figure the Union defended in the Balram Singh proceedings as the only reliable and authoritative data. Even that figure is less than a third of the rural households the Socio Economic and Caste Census had counted in 2011 with a member in the occupation, and the categories are not the same: the census counted households in which the work was a source of livelihood, while the statutory survey counts individuals verified against eligibility conditions, in places the local authority reached, who were willing to be recorded as doing work that is a criminal offence for their employer and a stigma for themselves. The Union’s own note in the 2023 proceedings recorded that the identified figure varied with the progress of the survey, mainly because of variations in the number of States and districts surveyed, and that figures given to Parliament on different dates differed for that reason. A count that grows as more districts are surveyed measures administrative effort as much as it measures the practice, and the amicus curiae’s submission in Balram Singh, that the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis itself had stated in an annual report that no reliable figure was available with the government and that the figure varied at various places, was not contradicted on the record the judgment reproduces.

Who does the work the two definitions divide

The two definitions also divide the workforce by sex, and the division explains part of the political asymmetry between the two columns of the record. The cleaning of dry latrines, the work of the first definition, has fallen overwhelmingly on women, engaged by households, municipalities and contractors in a pattern the Safai Karamchari Andolan documented across decades and that the 2014 judgment recognised in directing that support for dignified livelihood be provided to safai karamchari women in accordance with their own choice of livelihood schemes. Entry into sewers and septic tanks, the work of the second definition, is performed overwhelmingly by men, and it is that work which kills, suddenly and in numbers that reach the newspapers. The consequence is a field in which the larger population of workers, the women cleaning latrines, generates the identification and rehabilitation statistics, while the smaller and deadlier practice generates the compensation statistics, and public attention follows the deaths rather than the population. A survey apparatus that undercounts, as the Supreme Court found the statutory surveys did, therefore understates principally the position of women whose work was less visible to the enumerators, conducted inside households and courtyards rather than at municipal sites, while the compensation apparatus built by the courts responds to deaths that are, by comparison, publicly undeniable. Neither column of the official record is a fair picture of the whole workforce, and the definitional analysis in this article should be read with that distribution in mind.

The caste composition of the workforce is the fact beneath every other fact in this field, and the Act itself states it in its preamble, which attributes the practice to the continuing existence of insanitary latrines and a highly iniquitous caste system. The work is hereditary in practice across much of the country, assigned by birth to particular Scheduled Caste communities, and that is why the constitutional frame of the statute runs through Article 17 and Article 46 and why the committees the Act creates reserve places for legislators and social workers drawn from, or representing, the scavenger community. It is also why the Protection of Civil Rights Act route matters: scavenging compelled on the ground of untouchability is not merely an employment offence but an enforcement of the disability that Article 17 abolished, and the worker who refuses the work asserts a constitutional right and not only a statutory one. The stigma that attaches to the occupation operates on the identification machinery as well, since a person asked by an enumerator to declare that she performs this work is asked to record herself, and her family after her, under a description she has every reason to escape, one reason among several why self-declaration under the Rules produced lists shorter than the occupation’s real extent.

Rehabilitation: the entitlements of an identified person

Section 13 states what inclusion in the final list is worth, and it is worth setting out in full because these are statutory entitlements, not scheme benefits, even though several of them are routed through schemes. A person included in the final list published under Section 11, or added to it under Section 12, shall be rehabilitated in the following manner. Within one month, the person is to be given a photo identity card containing, among other things, details of all members of the family dependent on the person, together with such initial, one-time, cash assistance as may be prescribed. The person’s children are entitled to scholarship as per the relevant scheme of the Central Government or the State Government or the local authorities, as the case may be. The person is to be allotted a residential plot and financial assistance for house construction, or a ready-built house with financial assistance, subject to eligibility and willingness and to the provisions of the relevant scheme. The person, or at least one adult member of the family, is to be given, subject to eligibility and willingness, training in a livelihood skill, and paid a monthly stipend of not less than three thousand rupees during the training period. The person, or at least one adult member of the family, is to be given, subject to eligibility and willingness, subsidy and concessional loan for taking up an alternative occupation on a sustainable basis, in the manner stipulated in the relevant scheme. And the person is to be provided such other legal and programmatic assistance as the Central Government or State Government may notify. Section 16 applies the same package, with the necessary changes, to persons identified through Panchayats in rural areas. The District Magistrate of the district concerned is made responsible for the rehabilitation of each manual scavenger in accordance with the section, and may assign responsibilities to subordinate officers and to officers of the concerned Municipality.

The timing the section prescribes is uneven in a way that predicts the delivery pattern. The photo identity card and the initial one-time cash assistance are to be given within one month of inclusion in the final list; they are the only components carrying an express deadline, and they are the components the delivery record shows reaching the identified population. For the scholarship, the residential plot or house, the training and the subsidy and loan, the section fixes no period at all, leaving the pace to the schemes through which they operate and to the District Magistrate’s responsibility without a date against which to measure it. A statutory entitlement without a timeline is enforceable in principle and postponable in practice, and the distribution of deadlines within Section 13, tight where the benefit is small and fixed, absent where the benefit is large and transformative, is a compact example of a pattern this series has met in other welfare statutes, in which the precision of a provision varies inversely with the cost of honouring it. The identity card itself should not be underrated in this accounting: for workers whose engagement was informal and undocumented, a state-issued card recording the person’s occupation and the members of the family dependent on the person is the first official document many possess that names them as a holder of entitlements rather than as a pair of hands, and it is the document on which every subsequent claim, for scholarship, housing or credit, is built.

The structure of the entitlement deserves the same exactness as the definitions. Two components are fixed by the Act itself: the photo identity card with family details, and the training stipend floor of three thousand rupees a month. The cash assistance is left to be prescribed, and the figure that has operated under the Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers is 40,000 rupees as one-time cash assistance to one identified manual scavenger in the family. The scholarship, housing, subsidy and loan components are expressly made subject to eligibility, willingness and the provisions of the relevant scheme of the Centre, the State or the local authority, which means the statute guarantees a route into those schemes rather than the quantum under them. That drafting choice is where much of the delivery argument lives. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment informed Parliament in July 2024 that one-time cash assistance of 40,000 rupees had been provided to all identified and eligible 58,098 manual scavengers, that capital subsidy up to 5,00,000 rupees had been provided to 2,507 manual scavengers and their dependants for alternative self-employment projects, and that skill development training had been provided to 24,294 identified manual scavengers and their dependants with a stipend of 3,000 rupees a month during training. Read against the entitlement list, the pattern is consistent: the component with a fixed, modest, one-time quantum achieved full coverage of the identified population, while the components routed through schemes and bank credit, which are the components capable of replacing a livelihood rather than supplementing one, reached a small fraction of it. The scheme architecture itself has been reorganised around mechanisation: the Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers, revised in November 2013 to accord with the Act, has had its components folded into the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem, NAMASTE, a joint initiative of the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, whose existing components include the rehabilitation elements while its centre of gravity sits on profiling sanitation workers and moving the work to machines.

The longer lineage of rehabilitation policy explains why the Act’s drafters insisted on putting the entitlements into the statute. Rehabilitation by scheme long predates the Act: a national scheme for the liberation and rehabilitation of scavengers operated from 1992, and the Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers succeeded it as the Union’s principal instrument, offering cash assistance, training and subsidised credit to identified workers and their dependants. Schemes of this kind share three structural limits that the record of two decades displayed. They reach only persons whom an administrative exercise has identified, so their coverage rises and falls with the quality of identification. They can be revised, renamed or allowed to lapse by executive decision, as the movement of components from the liberation scheme to the self-employment scheme and onward into NAMASTE illustrates, without any legislature being asked. And their benefits are expenditure, not entitlement: a person omitted from a list has no statutory claim to enforce, only a grievance to pursue. Section 13 was drafted against that history. Its list is in the Act, its stipend floor is in the Act, the District Magistrate’s personal responsibility is in the Act, and the identification that unlocks it can be demanded by the worker’s own application under Section 12 when the official machinery does not move. That the delivery figures show the scheme-shaped pattern described above, full coverage of the cheap component and thin coverage of the transformative ones, is the measure of how much of the entitlement the drafters still had to route through the schemes they distrusted, since the housing, scholarship, subsidy and loan clauses all operate through the provisions of the relevant scheme of the Centre, the State or the local authority.

A sentence of caution belongs here rather than in a footnote. The position described in this article is the general statutory position, and general information of this kind is not a substitute for advice on an individual claim: a family pursuing compensation or rehabilitation in a specific case faces limitation periods, evidentiary demands and forum rules that are unforgiving of delay, and should take advice on its own facts.

The monitoring architecture

Chapter VII of the Act builds four tiers of oversight and then gives the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis a defined role within them. Section 24 requires every State Government to constitute a Vigilance Committee for each district and each sub-division. The district committee is chaired by the District Magistrate and brings together the members of the State Legislature belonging to the Scheduled Castes elected from the district, the district Superintendent of Police, the chief executive officers of the district Panchayat, the Municipality of the district headquarters, any Municipal Corporation and any Cantonment Board, a representative of the railway authority, up to four nominated social workers from organisations working for the prohibition of manual scavenging and rehabilitation or representing the scavenger community, two of whom must be women, a representative of financial and credit institutions, and the district officer in charge of Scheduled Castes welfare as member-secretary. The sub-division committee mirrors it under the Sub-Divisional Magistrate. Each committee must meet at least once in every three months. Section 25 gives the committees their functions: to advise the District Magistrate or Sub-Divisional Magistrate on the action needed to ensure the Act and its rules are properly implemented, to oversee the economic and social rehabilitation of manual scavengers, to coordinate the agencies with a view to channelising adequate credit for rehabilitation, and to monitor the registration of offences under the Act and their investigation and prosecution. Section 26 requires a State Monitoring Committee in every State, chaired by the Chief Minister or a nominated Minister, with the Director-General of Police, the secretaries of the concerned departments, representatives of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and of the Safai Karamcharis commission, Scheduled Caste legislators, social workers and the state-level head of the convener bank of the State Level Bankers’ Committee, meeting at least once in every six months, with functions under Section 27 of monitoring and advising the State Government and local authorities and coordinating the agencies. Section 28 requires States and Union territories to send periodic reports on implementation to the Central Government. Section 29 requires a Central Monitoring Committee chaired by the Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, with the chairpersons of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, three elected Members of Parliament belonging to the Scheduled Castes, the secretaries of the concerned Union ministries, the Chairman of the Railway Board, representatives of not less than six State Governments and one Union territory and up to six social workers, meeting at least once in every six months, and Section 30 assigns it the corresponding monitoring, advisory and coordination functions at the national level. Section 32 lets a State designate a State Commission for Safai Karamcharis, a State Commission for the Scheduled Castes or another authority to perform the National Commission’s functions within the State.

Section 31 assigns the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis four functions under the Act: to monitor its implementation, to enquire into complaints regarding contravention of its provisions and convey findings to the concerned authorities with recommendations for further action, to advise the Central and State Governments on effective implementation, and to take suo motu notice of matters relating to non-implementation. In discharging them the Commission may call for information from any government or local or other authority. What Section 31 does not give the Commission is the power to compel: it can enquire, find, recommend and advise, and its own submission in the Balram Singh proceedings, recorded in the judgment, was that unlike other commissions it has no power to summon officers of the establishments concerned or record their oral evidence, that it is consequently unable to assert itself effectively in providing relief, and that it faced a shortage of staff, with sixteen personnel responsible for all of its functions including internal administration. Beneath that sits a deeper anomaly. The Commission was constituted under the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis Act, 1993, and the judgment records that the parent Act lapsed on 29 February 2004, and that since then the Commission has functioned as a non-statutory, temporary body under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, its tenure extended periodically by notification, the extension recorded in the proceedings running from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2025. The 2013 Act thus assigns statutory monitoring functions to a body whose own statutory foundation no longer exists, a position the Section 2 definition accommodates by defining the Commission as the body constituted under the 1993 Commission Act and continued by government resolution.

The architecture’s weakness in operation was documented by the Court from the Union’s own submissions. In May 2023 the Court observed, in the passage the judgment reproduces, that the Central Monitoring Committee comprises more than twenty members and had apparently not met for three years, and that in ten years it had met seven times. The Union’s note of July 2023 placed before the Court the position that information on committees had been received from thirty-four States and Union Territories, that twenty-six had formed State Monitoring Committees, twenty-seven had set up district Vigilance Committees and twenty-three had constituted sub-division level Vigilance Committees, and that in twenty-three States a State Commission for Safai Karamcharis had been established or an agency designated. The Court’s conclusion, at paragraphs 67 and 68 of the judgment, was that a major shortcoming in the implementation of the 2013 Act is that State and Central Governments have not even constituted the various institutions required to implement it, that where constituted the institutions are not functioning, and that instead of operating as a check on implementation, the absence of the institutions has brought implementation to a standstill, since the Act’s design makes enforcement depend on the very bodies that were never built.

The implementing authorities on the ground

Between the committees and the prohibitions stand the officers who are meant to work the Act district by district, and Chapter V assigns their duties with unusual specificity. Section 19 places the District Magistrate, the authorities specified under Section 18 and their subordinate officers under a duty to ensure, after the expiry of the periods the Act specifies, five things within the jurisdiction: that no person is engaged or employed as a manual scavenger, that no one constructs, maintains, uses or makes available for use an insanitary latrine, that manual scavengers identified under the Act are rehabilitated in accordance with Section 13 or Section 16, that persons contravening Sections 5, 6 or 7 are investigated and prosecuted, and that all provisions of the Act applicable within the jurisdiction are duly complied with. Section 18 empowers the appropriate government to confer such powers and impose such duties on a local authority and a District Magistrate as are necessary to ensure the Act is properly carried out, and lets the local authority and the District Magistrate in turn specify subordinate officers to exercise the powers and perform the duties within stated local limits. Section 17, already noticed, fixes the local authority with the responsibility of ensuring that after nine months from commencement no insanitary latrine exists in its jurisdiction and that defaulting occupiers are proceeded against. Section 13(2) makes the District Magistrate personally responsible for the rehabilitation of each identified manual scavenger in the district. The concentration is deliberate: for every operative outcome the Act demands, there is a named district officer who can be asked why it has not occurred, and the vigilance committee the same officer chairs is required to monitor, among other things, the registration and prosecution of offences. The design’s weakness is the mirror of its strength, since the officer responsible for prosecution is also the officer whose district’s record a prosecution would stain, a conflict the Act creates rather than resolves.

Section 20 supplies the inspection arm. The appropriate government may appoint inspectors for the purposes of the Act and define the local limits of their jurisdiction. An inspector may enter, at all reasonable times and with such assistance as is considered necessary, any premises or place to examine and test any latrine, open drain or pit, or to conduct an inspection where there is reason to believe an offence has been, is being or is about to be committed, and to prevent employment of any person as a manual scavenger. The inspector may examine any person found on the premises who is reasonably believed to be employed as a manual scavenger or able to furnish information about compliance, may require information about the names and addresses of persons employed as manual scavengers and of the persons, agencies or contractors employing them, and may seize or take copies of registers, wage records and notices considered relevant to an offence believed to have been committed by the principal employer or agency. A person required to produce a document or give information is deemed legally bound to do so within the meaning of Sections 175 and 176 of the Indian Penal Code, and the search and seizure provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply as they apply to a search under a warrant issued under Section 94 of that Code. The inspectorate is, on paper, the answer to the evidentiary problem that subcontracting creates, because its powers run against records and premises rather than against the shifting identities of the men at the site. Its effectiveness depends entirely on appointments: an inspector who has not been appointed cannot enter, examine or seize, and the Balram Singh record of unconstituted institutions suggests the pattern that applied to committees applied to inspectors as well, though the judgment’s findings were directed at the named committees and commissions rather than at the inspectorate as such.

The judicial record: the directions of 2014

The Act had been in force for less than four months when the Supreme Court first gave it operative content from the bench. The Safai Karamchari Andolan, the movement of sanitation workers whose national convenor is Bezwada Wilson, had petitioned the Court in 2003 under Article 32, and on 27 March 2014 the Court delivered judgment in Safai Karamchari Andolan v Union of India, reported at (2014) 11 SCC 224, issuing directions that did three things the statute’s text had left at large. First, it ordered that the persons included in the final lists of manual scavengers under the Act be rehabilitated in the manner of Chapter IV, restating the entitlements: one-time cash assistance as prescribed, scholarships for children, allotment of a residential plot and financial assistance for house construction or a ready-built house, training in a livelihood skill for at least one member of the family with a monthly stipend during training, subsidy and concessional loan for an alternative occupation, and such other legal and programmatic assistance as the governments notify. Second, it addressed sewer deaths directly. Entering sewer lines without safety gear should be made a crime even in emergency situations, the Court directed, and for each such death compensation of ten lakh rupees should be given to the family of the deceased. Third, and most consequentially for the counting question, it directed the identification of the families of all persons who had died in sewerage work, in manholes and septic tanks, since 1993, and the award of compensation of ten lakh rupees for each such death to the family members depending on them. The Court added that persons released from manual scavenging should not have to cross hurdles to receive what is their legitimate due under the law, that support for dignified livelihood should be provided to safai karamchari women in accordance with their choice of livelihood schemes, that the Railways should take a time-bound strategy to end manual scavenging on the tracks, and that rehabilitation must be based on the principles of justice and transformation.

The 2014 judgment also contains the Court’s first finding on the identification machinery, which later proceedings would build on. The Court held that the survey of 2013 was inadequate, that it had been confined to 3,546 statutory towns and had not extended to rural areas, and that the States had been able to identify only a minuscule proportion of the number of people actually engaged in manual scavenging. The significance of the compensation direction should not be missed. The Act itself fixes no compensation for a death. The ten lakh figure was a judicial creation, pegged to deaths in sewerage work since 1993, the year of the first prohibition statute, and it created a parallel entitlement, resting on court order rather than statute, that the executive then had to administer by identifying deaths it had never systematically counted. Almost a decade later, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment submitted in the Balram Singh proceedings that, in compliance with the order of 27 March 2014, compensation had been provided to 948 families of those who died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks. The same sentence of that submission carried the statement that there have been no reported deaths resulting from manual scavenging. The two halves of that sentence are the article’s subject in miniature.

The judicial record: Dr Balram Singh, October 2023

The proceedings decided on 20 October 2023 began as a writ petition under Article 32 filed in 2020 by Dr Balram Singh, seeking implementation of the 1993 and 2013 Acts, with K. Parmeshwar appearing as amicus curiae. The road to the judgment shows the Court’s method, and one interim order in particular deserves record because it framed the inquiry the final judgment answered. On 22 February 2023 the Court directed the Union to place on record the steps taken pursuant to the 2014 judgment and the status of implementation of the 2013 Act, including steps towards rehabilitation of persons falling within the definition of manual scavenger; the steps taken towards abolition and demolition of dry latrines, state-wise; the status of dry latrines and safai karamcharis in Cantonment Boards and the Railways; the employment of safai karamcharis in the Railways and Cantonment Boards, directly or indirectly through contractors or otherwise; the state-wise set-up of municipal corporations and the nature of the equipment deployed by such bodies to mechanise sewage cleaning; and the feasibility of developing internet-based solutions for real-time tracking of sewage deaths and of action taken towards compensation and rehabilitation of families. The affidavits those directions produced, from the Union, the Ministry, the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, the Railways and the Cantonment Boards, supplied the figures this article has relied on, including the 1,035 deaths, the 948 compensated families, the committee returns and the prosecution position, which is a further reason to treat the judgment, rather than any single affidavit, as the source of record for the field: it is the point at which the competing official accounts were placed side by side and tested. The judgment of S. Ravindra Bhat and Aravind Kumar JJ, reported at 2023 INSC 950, is the fullest judicial examination the statute has received, and four of its holdings structure the field. The first concerns the survey. The Court held that neither the 2013 nor the 2018 survey could be accepted as a survey conducted under the Act and the Rules of 2013, because the institutions entrusted with conducting them were either not constituted or not functioning, because no provisional list had been prepared under Section 11(4), no objections called for and decided under Section 11(5) and no final list published under Section 11(6), and because the method the Act and Rules prescribe is the only method that can be followed. The Court rejected the Union’s argument that Section 11 requires only localised surveys by local bodies and not a national survey, holding that the Central and State Governments were and are duty bound to lay down the parameters under which a local body conducts a survey, that the absence of a trigger for the survey in the Act and Rules cannot render the Act and its constitutional commitments futile through non-implementation, and that local bodies must be guided by the higher governments in when a survey must be conducted and which bodies must conduct it.

The Court’s reasoning on the survey repays separate attention because it supplies the governing construction of Chapter IV. The Union had contended that Section 11 contemplates localised surveys by local bodies, triggered by each Municipality’s own reason to believe that manual scavenging exists in its jurisdiction, and that no national survey is contemplated by the Act. The Court rejected the premise that this reading could excuse the outcome. The 2013 Act, it held, is not a regular statute; it is emancipatory in character and a manifestation of the constitutional code of upliftment, and its groundbreaking purpose is to ensure that manual scavengers are rehabilitated. Rehabilitation is a step after identification, and without a survey rehabilitation is not workable. The methodology of the survey is provided in the Rules of 2013, but the trigger for conducting one is conspicuously absent from both the Act and the Rules, and the absence of a trigger cannot render the Act and its constitutional commitments futile through non-implementation. It followed that while local governments must conduct the surveys, the Central and State Governments were and are duty bound to lay down the parameters under which a local body is mandated to conduct one, including guidelines on when a survey must be conducted and which local bodies must conduct it, since a local body cannot be expected to implement the Act properly without a policy of that nature. On the facts, the Court found the surveys of 2013 and 2018 wanting for a further and independent reason: where the Act and Rules prescribe a particular method and manner of survey, that method and no other must be followed, and in neither exercise had the prescribed sequence been completed, there being no provisional list under Section 11(4), no objections called for and decided under Section 11(5), and no final list published under Section 11(6). The Court also treated the point as concluded against the Union by its own earlier authority, since the 2014 judgment in Safai Karamchari Andolan had already noticed the shortcomings of the survey of 2013, and a survey once found insufficient by the Court could not be relied on again as valid.

The second holding concerns institutions, and has been set out in the monitoring section of this article: the non-constitution and non-functioning of the committees and commissions the Act requires was identified as the point at which implementation had stalled. The third concerns the constitutional reading of hazardous cleaning under Article 23, set out in the definitions section: unprotected hazardous cleaning is forced labour, gear and devices are entitlements rather than benefits, and consent does not cure the violation. The fourth is a holding by restraint. The petitioner had argued that the separate treatment of manual scavenging and hazardous cleaning under the Act violates Article 14 for want of rational differentiation between the two. The Court answered that it was not faced with a challenge to the statute, and that without such a challenge the differentiation cannot be held unconstitutional. The two definitions, and the two counts they generate, therefore stand as Parliament enacted them, and any argument against the separation must be made to a court in a properly constituted challenge or to Parliament itself.

The judgment closes, at paragraph 96, with fourteen directions, of which the load-bearing ones are these. The Union is to frame policies and issue directions to ensure that manual sewer cleaning is eradicated completely in a phased manner, and that any sewer cleaning work outsourced, or discharged through contractors or agencies, does not require individuals to enter sewers for any purpose whatsoever, with States and Union Territories directed to embody the Union’s guidelines in their own and to apply them to all municipalities and local bodies. Full rehabilitation, including employment to the next of kin, education to the wards and skill training, is to be ensured for sewage workers and for those who die. Compensation for sewer deaths is increased to thirty lakh rupees, the Court reasoning that the ten lakh figure fixed earlier was made applicable from 1993 and that its present equivalent is thirty lakhs, and the increased amount is payable to dependants who have not been paid, and is the amount to be paid thereafter. For sewer victims suffering disabilities, compensation is to be disbursed according to severity, with a minimum of ten lakh rupees and not less than twenty lakh rupees where the disability is permanent and renders the victim economically helpless. The appropriate governments are to devise an accountability mechanism for deaths in contractual or outsourced work, in the form of cancellation of the contract forthwith and imposition of monetary liability, and the Union is to devise the model contract described earlier in this article. The National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and the Secretary of the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment are to draw modalities for the conduct of a national survey within three months, the survey to be ideally conducted and completed within one year, with training models prepared so that the survey does not suffer the fate of the previous ones. Scholarships are to be set up for the dependants of sewer victims who have died or suffered disabilities. The National Legal Services Authority is to be part of the consultations on policy, to be involved with state and district legal services authorities in planning and implementing the survey, and to frame models for easy disbursement of compensation. Coordination with the commissions for setting up state and district level committees and commissions in a time bound manner is directed, with constant monitoring of vacancies. The commissions and the Union government are to prepare training and education modules for district and state agencies. And a portal and dashboard are to be developed and launched containing all relevant information, including information relating to sewer deaths, the victims, and the status of compensation disbursement and rehabilitation measures. The matter was listed again for 1 February 2024, which is to say the Court kept the case.

The monitoring since the judgment

The proceedings after October 2023 are part of the statute’s record and are described here as the continuing proceedings they are. The Union filed a status report on 30 January 2024 setting out compliance measures. By an order dated 11 December 2024, a bench of Sudhanshu Dhulia and Aravind Kumar JJ recorded that most of the directions given in the order dated 20 October 2023 had not been complied with, that in some cases the formation of the statutory bodies the States are mandated to constitute under the Acts had not been done, naming the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, the State Commissions, the Central Monitoring Committee, the State Monitoring Committees, the Vigilance Committees and the state and district level survey committees, and that little progress had been made in the field of mechanisation although, considering technological and scientific advancement, complete eradication of manual scavenging, insanitary latrines and the use of manual labour in sewer lines was entirely possible. The Court allowed the Union to convene a meeting of all stakeholders, including the Central and State Monitoring Committees and the other statutory bodies, within two weeks, and directed the Union to file a detailed compliance affidavit, including state-wise progress, the extent of compliance on each head of the 2023 directions, the inaction and shortfall on each and the reasons for it, within two weeks after the meeting, listing the matter on 29 January 2025. On that date the bench directed that manual scavenging and hazardous cleaning be stopped in the six metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and sought compliance reports from the responsible officers of those cities. A reader who wants the present position in a live matter of this kind should verify it against the Court’s later orders, since a monitored proceeding of this character generates directions at each listing and the record described here closes with the orders of January 2025.

Overlapping prohibitions: the same act under three statutes

Manual scavenging is the rare practice that three central statutes punish from three different directions, and a complete account of the 2013 Act must place it among them, because the overlaps explain both the redundancy critics point to and the enforcement choices prosecutors actually face. The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, enacted under Article 17 as the Untouchability (Offences) Act and renamed and strengthened in 1976, punishes the enforcement of disabilities arising out of untouchability, and its Section 7A provides that whoever compels any person, on the ground of untouchability, to do any scavenging or sweeping, or to remove any carcass, or to flay any animal, or to do any other job of a similar nature, shall be deemed to have enforced a disability arising out of untouchability. The gravamen there is the caste ground of the compulsion. The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, as amended by the Amendment Act of 2015, makes it an offence of atrocity for a person who is not a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe to make a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe do manual scavenging or to employ or permit the employment of such a member for that purpose, a provision inserted into Section 3 of that Act by the same amendment that rebuilt much of its offence structure. The gravamen there is the identity of the victim and of the perpetrator. The 2013 Act, by contrast, is indifferent to caste as an element: its offences turn on the engagement, the place and the employer’s default, and they bind municipalities, agencies and householders of every description. The three statutes therefore divide a single social fact by three different legal questions, why the work was imposed, on whom it was imposed, and in what conditions it was done, and a prosecutor confronting a death or an engagement chooses among them by the evidence available, the forum each provides and the sentence each carries, with the atrocities statute offering the most serious frame where its identity elements can be proved.

The structural lineage runs in another direction as well. The 2013 Act’s identification, release and rehabilitation scheme, worked by district and sub-division vigilance committees chaired by the District Magistrate and charged with overseeing rehabilitation and coordinating credit, follows the template of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, which built the same architecture for bonded labour a generation earlier: statutory identification, release by operation of the Act, vigilance committees at district and sub-division level, and rehabilitation as the point of the exercise. The resemblance is instructive in both directions. It shows the 2013 drafters reaching for the one Indian statutory model that had treated an hereditary, caste-bound labour practice as a problem of identification and rehabilitation rather than of prohibition alone. And it imports the older Act’s known weakness, since the bonded labour framework’s record is itself one of identification exercises that found a small fraction of the population other evidence indicated, of vigilance committees that met irregularly, and of rehabilitation that thinned as it moved from release to livelihood. A reader who knows the 1976 Act’s history will read Chapter IV and Chapter VII of the 2013 Act with informed expectations, and the record assembled in this article suggests those expectations would have been met.

Two definitions, two counts

The centrepiece of this field is a submission the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment made to the Supreme Court, recorded at paragraph 44 of the Balram Singh judgment, and it should be quoted in substance because no paraphrase improves it. The Ministry submitted that since 1993, 1,035 individuals had lost their lives in accidents while doing hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks; that in compliance with the Supreme Court’s order of 27 March 2014, compensation had been provided to 948 families of those who died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks; and that there have been no reported deaths resulting from manual scavenging. Both counts are accurate, and they are accurate because of Section 2. A death in a sewer or a septic tank is, by definition, an event in the law of hazardous cleaning, because those spaces are the subject matter of Section 2(1)(d) and of no other provision. Manual scavenging, by definition, occurs in an insanitary latrine, an open drain or pit receiving excreta from insanitary latrines, a railway track, or notified premises of that character. A worker who dies in a septic tank has therefore not died of manual scavenging as the Act defines it, however continuous the two kinds of work are in the life of the person who performed both, and however continuous they are in the public understanding of a single occupation. The practice the statute is named for can accordingly be reported as producing no deaths at all, across the whole period since 1993, while the adjacent practice that the same statute prohibits in the next breath has produced a recorded toll above one thousand.

The same pattern repeats in the answers the government gives Parliament, which the judgment also reproduces. In December 2021 the government informed the Rajya Sabha that there were no reports of individuals engaged in manual scavenging across the country and no reported deaths attributed to manual scavenging, and clarified that during the previous five years, 321 individuals had lost their lives in accidents while undertaking hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. It informed the Lok Sabha in the same month, in answer to a separate question, that there were no reports of individuals engaged in manual scavenging in the country. The identified population of manual scavengers stood at the same time at 58,098 persons, each of whom had been identified through a statutory survey as a person engaged in manual scavenging. A government can hold these positions together without internal contradiction only because identification, engagement and death are counted under different heads at different moments, and the definitional wall between the heads does the rest. Readers of official statistics in adjacent fields learn to ask which denominator produced a figure before asking whether the figure is true, a discipline this series has applied to the enforcement record of other statutes, including the record of the anti-terror laws, where the gap between arrests, prosecutions and convictions does similar work. In this field the prior question is not the denominator but the definition: not how many, but of what.

Question	Manual scavenging	Hazardous cleaning
Statutory definition	Section 2(1)(g): a person engaged or employed for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of or otherwise handling in any manner human excreta in an insanitary latrine, an open drain or pit receiving excreta from insanitary latrines, or on a railway track, before the excreta fully decomposes; a person cleaning excreta with notified devices and protective gear is not deemed a manual scavenger	Section 2(1)(d): manual cleaning of a sewer or septic tank by an employee without the employer providing protective gear and other cleaning devices and ensuring observance of safety precautions as prescribed
Prohibition	Section 5: no person, local authority or agency shall construct an insanitary latrine or engage or employ, directly or indirectly, a manual scavenger, from the commencement of the Act on 6 December 2013	Section 7: no person, local authority or agency shall engage or employ any person for hazardous cleaning of a sewer or septic tank, from a date notified by the State Government not later than one year from commencement
Penalty	Section 8: first contravention, imprisonment up to one year or fine up to fifty thousand rupees or both; subsequent contravention, imprisonment up to two years or fine up to one lakh rupees or both	Section 9: first contravention, imprisonment up to two years or fine up to two lakh rupees or both; subsequent contravention, imprisonment up to five years or fine up to five lakh rupees or both
Deaths recorded	None reported as resulting from manual scavenging, as submitted by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in the Balram Singh proceedings and stated in Parliament in December 2021	1,035 individuals lost their lives in accidents while doing hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks since 1993, as submitted by the Ministry in the same proceedings; 321 such deaths in the five years preceding December 2021, as stated in Parliament
What the person or family receives	On identification under Sections 11 to 16: photo identity card, one-time cash assistance as prescribed (40,000 rupees under the rehabilitation scheme), scholarships for children, residential plot or house construction assistance, livelihood training with a stipend of not less than three thousand rupees a month, subsidy and concessional loan for an alternative occupation	Compensation for a sewer death of thirty lakh rupees under the Supreme Court’s direction of 20 October 2023 in Dr Balram Singh, increased from ten lakh rupees fixed by the direction of 27 March 2014; disability compensation of not less than ten lakh rupees, and not less than twenty lakh rupees for permanent disability rendering the victim economically helpless; compensation paid to 948 families under the 2014 direction as submitted by the Ministry

The table is the field in one object, and a companion presentation of the two definitions and their two counts arranged as a slide deck on ReportMedic serves a reader preparing to teach or examine the distinction. Two cautions about the table’s last row but one. The figure of 1,035 is the government’s own count of recorded deaths, compiled from reports that reach it; it is a floor, not a measure, since a death enters it only if it is reported as a sewer or septic tank accident by the authority responsible for the space in which it happened. And the zero in the manual scavenging column is a definitional zero, as this section has explained: it records that no death has been classified under that head, which is a statement about the classification and not, by itself, a statement about the safety of the work the head describes. A related route into the same conduct runs through the older equality statute: compelling a person, on the ground of untouchability, to do scavenging or sweeping or similar work is itself punishable as the enforcement of a disability arising out of untouchability under the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, whose Section 7A names scavenging expressly, so that the same act of compulsion can be prosecuted as an atrocity against dignity under one statute and as an employment offence under the other.

The government’s case and the critics’ case

The government’s position deserves statement in its strongest form, because it is not a foolish position and treating it as one weakens the criticism that matters. The definitions are not the Ministry’s invention. They are the text Parliament enacted in 2013, after a legislative process in which the distinction between the latrine-based practice and sewer entry was the statute’s central design decision, and the Ministry reports against the text it is given. The compensation record, on the government’s own submission, shows payment to 948 of 1,035 recorded families, a proportion above ninety per cent, under a direction that required the state to identify deaths reaching back to 1993 for which no register had ever been kept. The rehabilitation scheme delivered its fixed cash component to every identified and eligible person on the defended count of 58,098. Mechanisation has been pursued as policy through the NAMASTE programme, the Railways have fitted bio-toilets across the coaching fleet and withdrawn the notifications that diluted the prohibition for track and coach cleaning, and the Swachh Bharat Mission’s construction and conversion of toilets on a very large scale attacked the insanitary latrine, which is the object on which the first definition depends, at its root. On this account, the zero in the manual scavenging column is not a trick: it is what the elimination of the dry latrine, pursued by statute and by mission together, would be expected to produce, and the deaths that remain belong to a different and harder problem, the mechanisation of sewer maintenance, on which the direction of policy is set and the technology exists.

Two further elements of the government’s record belong in its case because they show the administrative position in its own terms. The Ministry has asked every district either to declare itself free of manual scavenging or to upload the data of insanitary latrines and the manual scavengers associated with them on a mobile application, the Swachhata Abhiyaan app launched on 24 December 2020, on which any person may upload the data of an insanitary latrine still in existence, for verification by the district administration. The Ministry informed Parliament in August 2023 that data had been collated from 580 districts that had reported themselves manual scavenging free, and it informed the Lok Sabha in July 2022 that, of the data uploaded on the app, not a single insanitary latrine had been confirmed. On the government’s account, these are the expected outputs of a practice in retreat: districts with nothing to report say so, and a public reporting channel open to any citizen produces no verified instance. The toilet construction programme supplies the physical counterpart of the same account, the Ministry recording that more than 10.88 crore sanitary toilets had been constructed in rural areas and 62.64 lakh in urban areas under the Swachh Bharat Mission since October 2014, with insanitary toilets converted, which on any view reduced the stock of the objects that generate the defined occupation.

The critics’ case, put by the Safai Karamchari Andolan over two decades of litigation and by the amicus curiae in the Balram Singh proceedings, accepts the text and attacks the operation. Its first limb is the definitional artefact: a reporting system in which the headline practice registers zero deaths while a thousand deaths accumulate in the adjacent column does not inform the public or Parliament; it reassures them, and the reassurance is available precisely because the classification is doing the work that the reality does not support, since the same communities, and frequently the same workers, perform both kinds of work. Its second limb is the survey: the Supreme Court itself held that the 2013 and 2018 surveys were not conducted as the Act and Rules require, that the institutions meant to conduct them were missing, and that the 2013 survey had identified only a minuscule proportion of those engaged, so the identification base on which eradication claims rest has been judicially found unreliable. Its third limb is outsourcing: the prohibition on sending a person into a sewer is defeated in practice by contractual structures in which the municipality engages an agency, the agency engages a contractor, and the contractor engages the worker, so that the employer whose default defines the offence is difficult to fix, a defect the 2023 directions addressed expressly through contract cancellation, monetary liability and the model contract. Its fourth limb is the prosecution record, taken up in the next section. To the district declarations and the silent app, the critics answer that both instruments measure the willingness of the reporting chain rather than the practice: a district that declares itself free closes its own file, since identification brings obligations and expenditure while a declaration brings neither, and an application that routes a citizen’s report of an insanitary latrine to the very district administration responsible for its existence, for confirmation by that administration, has reproduced in software the incentive structure that defeated the surveys. The Ministry’s own formulation in July 2024, that no credible data had been uploaded on the app, is quoted by each side for the opposite proposition. On this account the statute’s failure is not that it defined two practices, which any careful drafter might have done, but that the state then governed by the more comfortable of the two numbers.

One interaction between the Act’s tracks deserves separate statement because it recurs in individual cases. The compensation track and the prosecution track run on different clocks and through different doors. A family claiming compensation for a sewer death proceeds administratively, on the strength of the Supreme Court’s directions, through the district administration and the legal services authorities, and claims of that kind are routinely assembled months after the death, once the family learns that an entitlement exists at all. The prosecution of the same death as an offence under Section 7, punishable under Section 9, must be set in motion by a complaint filed within three months of the occurrence, failing which Section 10 bars the court from taking cognizance. The two tracks therefore select against each other: the route that pays is open when the route that punishes has closed, and an administration that processes the compensation claim of a bereaved family has no statutory prompt to convert the file before it into the complaint the criminal process requires. Nothing in the Act obliges the District Magistrate, who is responsible for rehabilitation and is the officer through whom compensation is pursued, to treat the material assembled for the one purpose as the foundation of a complaint for the other, although Section 19’s duty to ensure that contravening persons are investigated and prosecuted is broad enough to bear that reading. The gap between the tracks is not an oversight in the drafting of either; it is the result of a statute that built its remedial machinery for delivery and its penal machinery for complaint, and never connected them.

The prosecution gap

The enforcement figures are the point at which the two accounts meet hardest evidence. The Union’s note placed before the Supreme Court in July 2023 recorded that, except for Karnataka and Delhi, no State or Union Territory had reported any prosecution under the 2013 Act. Set that against the rest of the record: 1,035 recorded deaths from hazardous cleaning since 1993, each of which represents, on the statutory definition, an engagement by some person, local authority or agency of a worker without the gear, devices and precautions the employer was obliged to provide, and the near-total absence of prosecutions outside two jurisdictions. The offences are cognizable and non-bailable, the penalties rise to five years, the District Magistrate is under a statutory duty to ensure that contravening persons are investigated and prosecuted, and the vigilance committees are required to monitor the registration of offences and their investigation and prosecution. The machinery of prosecution is, on paper, complete. Its output is close to nil.

The reasons are contested, and the contest maps onto a genuine analytical division. One explanation is capacity: the offences are tried by Executive Magistrates on whom judicial powers must be conferred, inspectors under Section 20 must be appointed before premises can be entered and evidence seized in the statutory manner, and in districts where the committees were never constituted there is no body whose function it is to notice that no case has been registered. A second explanation is reluctance: the largest employers of sanitation labour are local authorities themselves, and a prosecution for hazardous cleaning is ordinarily a prosecution of a municipal contractor, a municipal officer’s decision, or a state agency’s practice, which the district administration must initiate against its own establishment or its own contractors. A third explanation is evidentiary and structural: where the work is subcontracted, the person who sent the worker into the sewer may be two or three contracts removed from the agency the Act can reach, the worker’s family may not know the name of the entity that engaged him, the engagement may be oral and daily, and Section 10 gives a complainant three months from the occurrence to file the complaint on which alone a court may take cognizance. These explanations are not rivals so much as layers, and the honest verdict is that each is supported by some part of the record. What the record does not support is the proposition that the gap reflects an absence of offences. The deaths are the offences, recorded under another head, and a prosecution rate near zero against a death count above one thousand is a measurement of the enforcement system rather than of the conduct it exists to punish. The wider framework within which this contracting structure sits, of principal employers, contractors and the shifting of statutory responsibility down a chain, is treated in the guide to the Indian labour law framework, and the Balram Singh model contract direction is best understood as an attempt to rebuild, through procurement, the liability that the criminal process has not delivered.

What has not changed since enactment

One change to the Act’s reach did occur, though Parliament made it in another statute: the extent exclusion of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, written into Section 1(2) in 2013, was overtaken by the reorganisation of that State in 2019, under which the central enactments, this Act among them, were extended to the successor Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The Act therefore operates across the whole country, a position its first decade did not have. The change is worth recording expressly because extent is among the most repeated errors in summaries of this statute, many of which continue to reproduce the 2013 exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir as though it remained the operative position, a decade’s worth of stale copying that the reorganisation of 2019 overtook for good.

For a statute whose operation has been judicially supervised for a decade, the 2013 Act has been remarkably little amended, and the gaps that litigation exposed remain in the text. No compensation for a sewer death is written into the Act: the thirty lakh figure rests on the Supreme Court’s direction of October 2023, and the ten lakh figure before it rested on the direction of March 2014, so that the single most consequential entitlement in the field exists as case law laid over a silent statute. In 2020 the Union Cabinet approved a proposal to amend the Act so as to make sewer cleaning fully mechanised, to strengthen the protection required before any cleaning is undertaken, and to place compensation for sewer deaths on a statutory footing; the amendment was not enacted, and the text stands as it stood in 2013. The three-month complaint limitation in Section 10 stands. The trial of offences by Executive Magistrates stands. The National Commission for Safai Karamcharis continues to discharge Section 31 functions on the strength of government resolutions extending a body whose parent Act lapsed in 2004, and the extension recorded in the Balram Singh proceedings ran to 31 March 2025. The definitions stand exactly as enacted, the Article 14 challenge to their separation never having been brought in the form the 2023 bench said would be required. The fresh national survey directed in October 2023, whose modalities were to be drawn within three months and which was ideally to be completed within a year, belongs to the same unclosed account: the December 2024 order records a compliance position in which the directions of 2023, the survey among them, had largely not been carried out, and the identification base of the field therefore remains the 58,098 of the rejected 2018 exercise and the figures the Census and the Socio Economic and Caste Census recorded in 2011, each counting a different thing, none superseded by a count the Court has accepted. A reader who asks what would most change the field, on the evidence this article has assembled, will find the candidates in this paragraph rather than in any proposal for new machinery: a compensation provision in the statute, a limitation period that does not expire before most violations surface, a prosecuting forum separated from the administration being prosecuted, and a statutory basis for the Commission charged with watching all of it.

Verdict

The 2013 Act is a well-built statute with a definitional fault line running through its centre, and the two halves of that sentence carry equal weight. The build is genuinely good: the prohibition is tied to the physical object that generates the work, contracts are voided while full-time workers are protected from retrenchment, identification and rehabilitation are enacted as entitlements with a named officer responsible for each person, the monitoring architecture is specified tier by tier, and the penalty for the dangerous practice is five times the fine and two and a half times the imprisonment of the practice the Act is named for. The fault line is that the statute’s two definitions, each defensible in isolation, together create an official account of the field in which the named evil can be declared deathless and, on some tellings, eradicated, while the deaths continue in the column next door. The series has found repeatedly that official figures in Indian legislation conflict because they are computed on different bases, and that finding is usually a caution about arithmetic. Here the divergence is not in the arithmetic at all. It is in the definition, upstream of every number, so that no improvement in data collection, no better survey and no more honest enumerator could reconcile the two counts, because the counts are answers to two different questions that share a name in ordinary speech. The repair, if there is to be one, is legislative or judicial, not statistical: either Parliament revisits the boundary between the definitions, or a court, in a challenge properly brought, tests it against Article 14, a door the Balram Singh bench noted was not before it. Until one of those things happens, the correct way to read any official statement in this field is the way this article has read the Ministry’s submission of 2023: as two statements, both accurate, about two different things, whose conjunction tells the truth that neither tells alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does the manual scavenging law of 2013 prohibit?

The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 prohibits two distinct things. Under Section 5, no person, local authority or agency may construct an insanitary latrine or engage or employ, directly or indirectly, a manual scavenger, and every person so employed stands discharged from any obligation to do the work. Under Section 7, no person, local authority or agency may engage or employ any person for hazardous cleaning of a sewer or a septic tank, meaning manual cleaning without the employer providing protective gear, cleaning devices and prescribed safety precautions. Section 6 adds that any contract for manual scavenging is void. The two prohibitions began on different dates: the first from the Act’s commencement on 6 December 2013, the second from a date each State Government had to notify within one year of commencement.

Q: Who is a manual scavenger under the Act?

Section 2(1)(g) defines a manual scavenger as a person engaged or employed, by an individual, a local authority, an agency or a contractor, for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of or otherwise handling in any manner human excreta in an insanitary latrine, or in an open drain or pit into which excreta from insanitary latrines is disposed of, or on a railway track, or in other notified spaces or premises, before the excreta fully decomposes. An Explanation provides that engagement may be on a regular or contract basis, so casual and contractual workers are covered. The same Explanation excludes a person who cleans excreta with the help of such devices and using such protective gear as the Central Government notifies, who is not deemed to be a manual scavenger.

Q: When does cleaning a sewer or septic tank count as hazardous?

Cleaning a sewer or septic tank counts as hazardous cleaning under Section 2(1)(d) when it is done manually by an employee without the employer fulfilling the employer’s obligations to provide protective gear and other cleaning devices and to ensure observance of safety precautions, as prescribed by the Rules of 2013 or provided in any other law or rules in force. The test is the employer’s default, not the worker’s task alone: the same physical cleaning is hazardous cleaning where the gear, devices and precautions are missing, and is outside the definition where they are supplied. Section 7 then prohibits engaging or employing any person for hazardous cleaning so defined, and the Supreme Court held in 2023 that such unprotected employment also amounts to forced labour prohibited by Article 23 of the Constitution.

Q: What rehabilitation is a released worker entitled to?

A person identified as a manual scavenger and included in the final list under Sections 11 to 16 is entitled under Section 13 to rehabilitation in a defined form. Within one month the person must receive a photo identity card recording the family members dependent on the person, together with one-time cash assistance as prescribed, which has been 40,000 rupees under the rehabilitation scheme. The person’s children are entitled to scholarships under the relevant government scheme. The person is to be allotted a residential plot with financial assistance for house construction, or a ready-built house with financial assistance, subject to eligibility and willingness. The person or at least one adult family member is to receive training in a livelihood skill with a monthly stipend of not less than three thousand rupees, and subsidy and a concessional loan for an alternative occupation, besides other legal and programmatic assistance the governments notify.

Q: What penalties does the manual scavenging law carry?

The Act punishes its two prohibitions on different scales. Contravention of Section 5 or Section 6, covering construction of an insanitary latrine and engagement of a manual scavenger, is punishable under Section 8 with imprisonment up to one year or a fine up to fifty thousand rupees or both for a first contravention, and imprisonment up to two years or a fine up to one lakh rupees or both for a subsequent contravention. Contravention of Section 7, the hazardous cleaning prohibition, is punishable under Section 9 with imprisonment up to two years or a fine up to two lakh rupees or both for a first contravention, and imprisonment up to five years or a fine up to five lakh rupees or both subsequently. By Section 22 every offence under the Act is cognizable and non-bailable, and prosecution requires a complaint within three months under Section 10.

Q: Why does the government report no manual scavenging deaths?

The report follows from the Act’s definitions rather than from a count of the work itself. Manual scavenging is defined by reference to insanitary latrines, open drains, pits and railway tracks, while deaths occur overwhelmingly in sewers and septic tanks, which the Act treats under the separate definition of hazardous cleaning. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment submitted in the Balram Singh proceedings that since 1993, 1,035 individuals had lost their lives in accidents while doing hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, that compensation had been paid to 948 families, and that there had been no reported deaths resulting from manual scavenging. Both statements are accurate on the statutory text: a worker who dies in a septic tank has not died of manual scavenging as Section 2 defines it. The government also told Parliament in December 2021 that 321 individuals had died in hazardous cleaning accidents in the preceding five years, alongside the statement that no deaths were attributed to manual scavenging.

Q: What did the Supreme Court direct about manual scavenging in 2023?

In Dr Balram Singh v Union of India, decided on 20 October 2023 by S. Ravindra Bhat and Aravind Kumar JJ, the Supreme Court issued fourteen directions. The Union and the States must frame policies to eradicate manual sewer cleaning in a phased manner and ensure that outsourced work does not require any person to enter a sewer for any purpose. Compensation for a sewer death was raised to thirty lakh rupees, with not less than ten lakh rupees for disability and not less than twenty lakh rupees for permanent disability rendering the victim economically helpless. Governments must ensure full rehabilitation of sewage workers and the families of those who die, devise accountability for deaths in outsourced work through contract cancellation and monetary liability, and produce a model contract. The national commissions and the Ministry were directed to draw modalities for a fresh national survey, scholarships were directed for dependants of sewer victims, and a portal and dashboard recording sewer deaths and compensation were ordered.

Q: Why has manual scavenging not been eradicated?

The reasons the record supports are institutional rather than textual. The Supreme Court held in 2023 that the surveys of 2013 and 2018 were not conducted as the Act and Rules require, that the institutions meant to conduct and oversee them, from survey committees to vigilance and monitoring committees, were in many places never constituted or not functioning, and that the Central Monitoring Committee had met seven times in ten years. Identification therefore never produced a reliable base, and rehabilitation is gated by identification. Prosecutions have been reported from only Karnataka and Delhi, although recorded deaths from hazardous cleaning since 1993 exceed one thousand, and the work is extensively outsourced through contracting chains that obscure the employer whose default defines the offence. In December 2024 the Court recorded that most of its 2023 directions had not been complied with. The prohibition is complete in the text; the machinery built to execute it was, in the Court’s finding, largely never assembled.

Q: What is an insanitary latrine under the Act?

Section 2(1)(e) defines an insanitary latrine as a latrine which requires human excreta to be cleaned or otherwise handled manually, either in situ, or in an open drain or pit into which the excreta is discharged or flushed out, before the excreta fully decomposes in the prescribed manner. The definition turns on the handling the latrine requires, not on its construction material or name, so a latrine of any design is insanitary if a person must remove its excreta by hand. A proviso excludes a water flush latrine in a railway passenger coach when it is cleaned by an employee with the help of notified devices and using notified protective gear. The definition pairs with the definition of manual scavenger: the latrine is insanitary because it requires manual handling, and the worker is a manual scavenger because the handling is of excreta from such a latrine or its drains and pits.

Q: What happens to an existing contract for manual scavenging when the Act applies?

Section 6 terminates it by force of the statute. Any contract, agreement or other instrument entered into before the commencement of the Act, engaging or employing a person for the purpose of manual scavenging, stands terminated on commencement, is void and inoperative, and no compensation is payable for the termination. A contractor therefore holds no subsisting right to deploy workers under an older agreement. The same section protects the worker rather than the contractor: a person employed or engaged as a manual scavenger on a full-time basis shall not be retrenched by the employer, but must be retained, subject to the person’s willingness, in employment on at least the same emoluments, and assigned work other than manual scavenging. The protection is expressly confined to full-time engagement, so a casual or contract worker does not carry the same retention right, although the worker’s discharge from the obligation to scavenge is unqualified.

Q: Can a worker apply to be identified as a manual scavenger instead of waiting for a survey?

Yes. Section 12 provides that any person working as a manual scavenger in an urban area may apply to the Chief Executive Officer of the Municipality, or an authorised officer, for identification as a manual scavenger, either during a survey under Section 11 or at any time after it. The application must be enquired into, as part of the survey if one is in progress, or within fifteen days of receipt if none is. If the application is found to be true, the person’s name is added to the final list published under Section 11 and the consequences of inclusion follow, including discharge from the obligation to work as a manual scavenger and the rehabilitation entitlements of Section 13. Sections 14 and 15 provide the corresponding application route in rural areas through the Panchayat. The route matters because the official surveys have repeatedly been found incomplete.

Q: Who is responsible for rehabilitating a person identified as a manual scavenger?

Section 13(2) makes the District Magistrate of the district concerned responsible for the rehabilitation of each manual scavenger in accordance with Section 13. The District Magistrate may assign responsibilities in that behalf to officers subordinate to the District Magistrate and to officers of the concerned Municipality. The identification itself is the work of the Municipality in urban areas and the Panchayat in rural areas, whose chief executive officers conduct the survey, publish the provisional list, decide objections and publish the final list that triggers the entitlement. Above the district, the vigilance committees oversee the economic and social rehabilitation of manual scavengers, the State Monitoring Committee monitors and advises the State Government and local authorities, and the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis monitors implementation, enquires into complaints of contravention and advises the Central and State Governments. The design names a single district officer as answerable for each identified person.

Q: Are offences under the manual scavenging Act cognizable and non-bailable?

Yes. Section 22 provides that, notwithstanding anything contained in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, every offence under the Act shall be cognizable and non-bailable, so the police may arrest without a warrant and bail is a matter of judicial discretion rather than of right. That severity sits alongside two qualifications elsewhere in the Act. Section 10 bars a court from taking cognizance of an offence except upon a complaint made by a person in this behalf within three months from the date of the occurrence of the alleged offence. Section 21 provides that the State Government may confer on an Executive Magistrate the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class for the trial of offences under the Act, and that an offence may be tried summarily. Section 23 extends liability for offences by companies to the persons in charge of the company’s business and to officers whose consent, connivance or neglect is proved.

Q: What did the Supreme Court direct in 2014 about deaths in sewerage work?

In Safai Karamchari Andolan v Union of India, decided on 27 March 2014 and reported at (2014) 11 SCC 224, the Supreme Court directed that the families of all persons who had died in sewerage work, in manholes and septic tanks, since 1993 be identified and that compensation of ten lakh rupees be awarded for each such death to the family members depending on the deceased. It directed that entering sewer lines without safety gear should be made a crime even in emergency situations, and that for each such death compensation of ten lakh rupees be given to the family. The Court also directed that persons included in the final lists of manual scavengers be rehabilitated as Chapter IV of the 2013 Act provides, that released workers should not have to cross hurdles to receive their legitimate due, that support for dignified livelihood be provided to safai karamchari women according to their choice of schemes, and that the Railways take a time-bound strategy to end manual scavenging on the tracks.

Q: How much compensation is payable for a death in a sewer or septic tank?

The amount is fixed by the Supreme Court’s directions, since the 2013 Act itself contains no compensation provision. The direction of 27 March 2014 in Safai Karamchari Andolan fixed ten lakh rupees for each death in sewerage work since 1993, payable to the family of the deceased, and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment later submitted that compensation had been paid to 948 families under that direction. In Dr Balram Singh, on 20 October 2023, the Court increased the amount to thirty lakh rupees, reasoning that the ten lakh figure had been made applicable from 1993 and that its present equivalent is thirty lakh rupees, and directed that the increased amount be paid to dependants who had not been paid and be the amount paid thereafter. For victims who survive with disabilities, the 2023 direction sets a minimum of ten lakh rupees, rising to not less than twenty lakh rupees where the disability is permanent and renders the victim economically helpless.

Q: Which committees and commissions monitor the Act’s implementation?

Section 24 requires a Vigilance Committee for every district and every sub-division, chaired by the District Magistrate and the Sub-Divisional Magistrate respectively, meeting at least once in three months, with functions under Section 25 that include overseeing rehabilitation and monitoring the registration, investigation and prosecution of offences. Section 26 requires a State Monitoring Committee in every State, chaired by the Chief Minister or a nominated Minister and meeting at least once in six months. Section 29 requires a Central Monitoring Committee chaired by the Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, also meeting at least once in six months. Section 31 assigns the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis the functions of monitoring implementation, enquiring into complaints of contravention, advising the Central and State Governments and taking suo motu notice of non-implementation, and Section 32 allows a State to designate a State Commission for Safai Karamcharis or for the Scheduled Castes to perform the same functions within the State.

Q: What must a local authority do about insanitary latrines in its jurisdiction?

Section 4 requires every local authority to survey the insanitary latrines in its jurisdiction and publish a list of them within two months of the Act’s commencement, and within fifteen days of publication to give the occupier notice to demolish the latrine or convert it into a sanitary latrine within six months of commencement, a period extendable by up to three months for recorded reasons. The authority must construct sanitary community latrines within nine months in the areas where insanitary latrines are found, and Municipalities, Cantonment Boards and railway authorities must also build adequate community latrines within a period not exceeding three years to eliminate open defecation, maintaining them hygienically. If an occupier fails to demolish or convert, the authority must, after not less than twenty-one days’ notice, convert or demolish the latrine itself and recover the cost from the occupier. Section 17 makes it the authority’s responsibility to ensure that after nine months no insanitary latrine is constructed, maintained or used in its jurisdiction.

Q: Within what time must a complaint be filed for an offence under the Act?

Section 10 sets a three-month limit. No court shall take cognizance of any offence punishable under the Act except upon a complaint made by a person in this behalf within three months from the date of the occurrence of the alleged commission of the offence. The limit is short relative to the way these offences come to light, since an engagement or a death may surface through a survey, a Commission inquiry, a news report or a compensation claim long after it occurs, and a complaint filed outside the window cannot found a prosecution however strong the material. The provision sits in visible tension with the rest of the scheme: the offences are cognizable and non-bailable under Section 22, the District Magistrate is under a duty under Section 19 to ensure that contravening persons are investigated and prosecuted, and the vigilance committees must monitor the registration and prosecution of offences, yet the door to the court closes three months after the event.

Q: Why did the Supreme Court refuse to accept the 2013 and 2018 surveys?

In Dr Balram Singh the Court held that neither survey had been conducted in the manner the Act and the Rules of 2013 prescribe, and that where the statute prescribes a method, that method alone can be followed. The institutions entrusted with the surveys were either not constituted or not functioning, no provisional list was prepared under Section 11(4), no objections were called for and decided under Section 11(5), and no final list was published under Section 11(6). The Court also held that the survey of 2013 had already been found insufficient in Safai Karamchari Andolan in 2014, where it was noticed that the survey had been confined to 3,546 statutory towns and that the States had identified only a minuscule proportion of those actually engaged, so the Union could not rely on the same survey again. It rejected the argument that Section 11 requires only localised surveys, holding that the Central and State Governments are duty bound to lay down the parameters and triggers for surveys by local bodies.

Q: Does a person employed full-time as a manual scavenger lose that job when the prohibition begins?

No. Section 6(2) provides that no person employed or engaged as a manual scavenger on a full-time basis shall be retrenched by the employer, but shall be retained, subject to the person’s willingness, in employment on at least the same emoluments, and shall be assigned work other than manual scavenging. The prohibition therefore falls on the task and not on the livelihood: the contract for the scavenging work is void under Section 6(1) and the worker stands discharged from any obligation to do it, but the full-time worker keeps the employment, the pay and a different assignment. The distinction the section draws is between engagement types. A worker engaged on a casual or daily basis does not hold the retention right the section gives the full-time worker, although that worker is equally discharged from the obligation to scavenge and equally able to seek identification and rehabilitation under Chapter IV.