Dying to Breathe
Caste, Law and the Urban Political Ecology of Manual Scavenging
Breathing in the Shadows of the City
Manual scavenging in India remains a recurring tragedy, woven into the fabric of urban life. Dalit men continue to descend into septic tanks without protective gear, often suffocating in toxic gases. This is not an isolated horror but a normalised reality - cities function because someone, somewhere, is dying to breathe.
Who Are Dalit Men?
Dalit men belong to communities historically oppressed under India’s caste system. Once labelled “untouchables,” they have long been forced into degrading labour, including cleaning human waste. Despite legal bans on caste discrimination, these men remain trapped in dangerous, invisible work that sustains urban life.
What Is Manual Scavenging?
Manual scavenging is the hazardous practice of cleaning human excreta from toilets, drains, and sewers by hand. Though illegal, it persists due to inadequate sanitation infrastructure and caste-based labour divisions. Dalit men are most often the ones performing this work, risking their lives in conditions that deny them safety, dignity, and recognition.
The Law’s Double Bind
The 2013 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act bans the practice but fails to address the infrastructural conditions that make it inevitable. By criminalising individuals and institutions without systemic reform, the law sanitises the state’s image while leaving workers exposed to death and invisibility.
Urban Political Ecology and Caste
Manual scavenging must be understood through the lens of urban political ecology. Cities are shaped by power, caste, and capital. Sanitation systems assume that certain bodies will always be available for the dirtiest work - bodies that are overwhelmingly Dalit. These workers are rendered disposable, invisible, and criminalised.
Infrastructural Violence and the Politics of Waste
The law recognises manual scavenging as a problem only insofar as it can be framed as illegal employment. It does not interrogate sewage systems that require manual intervention, nor does it challenge caste-based labour regimes. In this way, the law becomes complicit - it performs a moral gesture while preserving the status quo.
Global Resonances
This is not just an Indian story. Across the world, urban sanitation is managed through hierarchies of labour and value. Migrant workers, racialised communities, and the poor are often tasked with maintaining the cleanliness of cities they are excluded from. The politics of waste is global - and deeply unequal.
Reimagining Justice and Infrastructure
Ending manual scavenging requires more than legal reform. It demands a reimagining of urban life - one that centres justice, dignity, and breath.
Read more:
Karamchedu, A. (2025). Dying to breathe: Caste, law and the urban political ecology of manual scavenging in India. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486251384552
Dr Ambarish Karamchedu is a Lecturer in International Development. His work focuses on India and explores the themes of agrarian and climatic change, neoliberalism, deagrarianisation, GM crops, the hydropolitics of groundwater and caste discrimination in labour markets.