At least 66 sanitation workers across India died between February and July 2026 while cleaning sewers, septic tanks, sewage treatment plants, and open drains, according to the Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch (DASAM), a rights group tracking caste-based forced labour in sanitation work. The deaths continue despite a 2013 law banning manual scavenging, repeated Supreme Court orders requiring full mechanisation of such cleaning, and constitutional guarantees of equality and the right to life.
DASAM says its count reflects only verified, reported cases, and that the real toll is almost certainly higher because of underreporting, informal employment arrangements, and what it calls the systematic misclassification of these deaths in official records.
A Widening Gap Between Official Data and Ground Reality
The scale of the crisis, according to DASAM, has been building for years. The group recorded 116 sanitation worker deaths in 2024 and roughly 42 more in the first half of 2025, putting the toll at around 158 deaths between 2024 and mid-2025.
Government figures presented in the Lok Sabha put the number at 332 sanitation worker deaths from January 2021 through June 2026. DASAM argues this figure understates the crisis, not because data is simply missing, but because of how individual deaths get labeled. In most cases, the group says, deaths inside sewers or septic tanks are never recorded under the Manual Scavenging Act. Instead, police reports, post-mortem documents, and news coverage describe them as "accidents," "drowning," "industrial mishaps," or "toxic gas exposure deaths." Deaths in rural and remote areas, DASAM adds, often escape both media coverage and government record-keeping entirely.
Once a death is labeled this way, DASAM contends, its legal status changes — removing it from the manual scavenging category and, with it, the path to prosecuting contractors, municipal bodies, or private institutions under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, or the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. DASAM describes this as a deliberate, structural pattern rather than a data error, saying its field investigations have repeatedly found that deaths recorded as ordinary workplace accidents were in fact manual scavenging incidents.
Month-by-Month Toll
Between February and June 2026 alone, DASAM documented 55 deaths:
- March: 20 deaths — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi
- April: 10 deaths — Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra
- May: 6 deaths — Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra
- June: 18 deaths — Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi
- July: 11 deaths — Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand
The group says the FIRs in many of these cases were filed under general negligence or accidental-death provisions rather than the Manual Scavenging Act — a distinction that weakens criminal accountability and can block families from compensation and rehabilitation they are legally owed.
DASAM points to a case near Faridabad as illustrative of how this happens. Early reports described construction workers accidentally falling into a sewage treatment plant. The group's own investigation found the men were cleaning the plant without protective equipment and died from inhaling toxic gas — a manual scavenging death that the initial, inaccurate report effectively erased from the record.
A Deadly July
- July brought another cluster of fatalities, DASAM says:
- July 2 — Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh: A worker died after inhaling toxic gas inside a sewage chamber.
- July 8 — Madhya Pradesh: Three workers died in two separate sewer and septic tank incidents.
- July 11 — Bhubaneswar, Odisha: Two workers died inside a septic tank, suspected toxic gas exposure.
- July 14 — Noida, Uttar Pradesh: A sanitation worker named Shiva died cleaning a sewer in Sector-93B.
- July 23 — Dhanbad, Jharkhand: Two workers died cleaning a septic tank.
- July 26 — Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh: Two workers died inside a sewage treatment plant tank after one entered to rescue the other — a "rescue-chain" pattern of multiple deaths that DASAM says recurs repeatedly across these incidents.
Caste and Labour
DASAM says more than 92% of sanitation workers belong to Dalit, Adivasi, and Other Backward Classes communities, many employed as migrants through informal contractors — a pattern it describes as entrenched caste-based occupational segregation. The group argues this violates constitutional protections under Article 14 (equality before law), Article 17 (abolition of untouchability), Article 21 (right to life and dignity), and Article 23 (prohibition of forced labour).
What DASAM Is Demanding
The organization is calling for:
- Mandatory FIR registration under the Manual Scavenging Act, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in every case
- Legal recognition of all sewer and septic tank deaths as manual scavenging deaths
- Independent judicial inquiries into each death
- Minimum compensation of Rs 30 lakh per victim's family
- Government employment and full rehabilitation for dependents
- Complete mechanisation of cleaning operations
- A nationwide audit of sanitation systems across public and private sectors
- A ban on subcontracting hazardous sanitation work to informal contractors
- Criminal prosecution of responsible contractors, officials, and institutions
- Mandatory training for police, municipal authorities, and the judiciary
-- Independent monitoring bodies at the national and state levels
"The continuing deaths of sanitation workers are not accidents but the outcome of a systemic failure that combines administrative denial, legal misclassification, weak enforcement, and entrenched caste discrimination," DASAM said in its statement, adding that it stands "in unwavering solidarity with all affected families" in demanding accountability and structural reform.
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