DOI: https://doi.org/10.36344/ccijhss.2026.v12i04.002

Pages: 95-100

Sewage labour in India is among the most dangerous and least protected forms of labour, despite its critical importance to maintain human life and public health. This paper discusses sewage work in the context of two related issues: occupational health and fragmented labour governance. It argues that the dangers of sewer and septic tank cleaning cannot be reduced to technical failure, lack of safety equipment, or individual negligence. Instead, these risks are to be interpreted within a larger social organisation of labour in which sewage work is treated as necessary, but the workers who do it are low-status, poorly protected, and socially devalued. In this system, worker safety is shared among the state, contractors, subcontractors and informal labour arrangements, and accountability is weak and unclear. The paper shows that sewage work is an institutionally neglected occupation organised around bodily risk, caste-based devaluation, and weak labour protection. It also contends that manual scavenging and dangerous sanitation labour continue not due to the lack of law or policy in India, but because of the lack of enforcement, fragmented accountability, and the continued social acceptance of caste-marked degrading labour. The paper concludes that sewage work in India needs to be addressed not only as a sanitation issue, but also as a question of labour justice, public health, social equality, and institutional accountability.