Swachh Bharat Mission: Caste and contracts in sanitation work

In October 2024, Swachh Bharat Mission, India’s largest sanitation project to make the country “open defecation-free”, turned 10. The project constructed over a hundred million toilets and launched behavioural change initiatives encouraging toilet use and hygiene practices to promote “cleanliness”.

In response to the increasing load on sewerage systems due to rising urban density, the mission’s urban component, SBM-U 2.0, focuses on improving sewage management and developing sewage treatment plants to create a sustainable and comprehensive urban sanitation system.

However, these interventions neglect the issues of sewage workers, who constitute the backbone of urban sewage infrastructures. This is seen in the rising contractualisation in sanitation work –outsourcing to private entities or third-party agencies, often with exploitative conditions for workers – that draws upon and reproduces historical inequalities of caste and class in urban India.

This piece draws upon the author’s doctoral research on sewage work and infrastructure in Delhi, alongside fact-finding surveys on sewer and septic tank deaths in 2024, conducted as part of a team of researchers and activists organised by Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch, a social and advocacy forum for sewer workers’ rights in the city.

It addresses two forms of contractualisation: privately contracting sewage work to informal workers or casual labourers, and the rising contractualisation in civic bodies that compounds caste inequality...

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