In summer 2024, while India’s government celebrated the Union Budget 2024-2025 and the “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India) vision—with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman declaring that India would remain the fastest-growing major economy, a tragedy was unfolding in sewers, septic tanks, and waste-collection routes across the country. According to the “Heat Watch 2024” report, titled Struck by Heat: A News Analysis of Heat Stroke Deaths in India in 2024, between March and June, 733 deaths due to heatstroke were reported across 17 states in India. Yet these statistics mask a deeper injustice — the deaths of sanitation workers predominantly from Dalit communities are rendered invisible by a state apparatus that simultaneously denies their existence and excludes them from the very climate adaptation strategies designed to save lives.
This is not merely a story of occupational hazard. It is the story of how climate catastrophe acts as a force multiplier for caste-based violence, transforming already dehumanising work into a slow death sentence for about five million sanitation workers in India. The climate-caste nexus is not theoretical. It is lethal, structural, and increasingly undeniable.
Between 2020 and 2024, India officially reported 294 deaths of workers cleaning sewers and septic tanks—a horrifying tally that amounts to a preventable death roughly every six days. And yet, the government clings to the illusion that manual scavenging — a practice banned in 1993 and reinforced by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act of 2013—no longer exists.
In 2024 alone, at least 116 manual scavengers lost their lives. By June 2025, that grim number had already climbed to 42 deaths. Altogether, between 2024 and mid-2025, there have been 158 documented deaths. These are numbers that only represent reported cases, leaving countless others uncounted, especially among contract workers whose lives disappear from official records as if erased. This ongoing silence hides a brutal reality of caste-driven exploitation and institutional neglect.
According to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), five sewer-related deaths occurred in Delhi between January 1 and August 31, 2025. With a death on September 16, the toll rose to six—making Delhi the worst-affected city in India for manual scavenger deaths this year, despite clear Supreme Court rulings banning the practice in major metropolitan areas. In January 2025, the Supreme Court issued an absolute ban on manual scavenging in six metro cities, including Delhi, yet the practice persists unabated. In June 2025, Delhi’s Public Works Department posted images on social media showing workers submerged in sewage without safety gear, celebrating work that violates Indian law. The post was promptly removed following widespread public outrage. This is not a failure of enforcement but a systemic denial disguised as progress.
The intersection of rising temperatures and caste-based work creates a uniquely catastrophic vulnerability. India’s 2024 heatwave was the nation’s longest since 2010, with many states experiencing daytime temperatures exceeding 40°C for entire months. By summer 2024, India had recorded 536 heatwave days across its meteorological subdivisions and over 44,000 cases of heatstroke. Yet sanitation workers—who must continue labouring in sewers where temperatures are amplified and toxic gases intensify—received no organisational support, no modified working hours, and no protective measures. India’s Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code of 2020 contains heat protection provisions only for dock workers, leaving approximately 380 million heat-exposed workers—including sanitation workers, construction labourers, and agricultural workers—with no legal protections. The Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, which governs the largest segment of India’s outdoor workforce, is completely silent on heat-related issues and its effect on workers. This legal vacuum leaves caste-based workers—who disproportionately occupy the most dangerous and heat-exposed occupations with no recourse as climate change intensifies heat extremes across India.
While heat action plans exist in 23 states, research demonstrates that they almost universally fail to account for caste-based occupational segregation. Marginalised caste groups face up to 150 per cent higher heat exposure during work compared to dominant caste groups for UTCI (Universal Thermal Climate Index) thresholds between 26°C and 35°C, but this is not reflected in India’s heat action plans. Instead of recognising this inequity, these plans treat risk as a uniform technical problem rather than what it truly is: a socially constructed form of violence.
For sewer workers, the mathematics of death is particularly brutal. A social audit commissioned by India’s own government found that over 90 per cent of workers who died from hazardous sewer cleaning had no safety gear or Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). In 47 of the 54 deaths analysed from 2022 and 2023, no safety equipment was used whatsoever.
The state’s response? The government’s NAMASTE scheme, launched in July 2023, has distributed PPE kits to only 45,871 of the 84,902 identified sewer and septic tank workers. According to a Parliamentary Standing Committee report tabled in August 2025, despite progress in profiling sanitation workers, significant gaps remain in providing them protective gear, health coverage and training. The Standing Committee warned that the slow pace of PPE distribution “could deprive many workers of crucial benefits”, particularly given that 377 sanitation workers died while performing hazardous sewer and septic tank cleaning between 2019 and 2023. The committee called for urgent action to ensure that no sanitation worker comes in direct contact with human faecal matter, one of the core objectives of the scheme. Yet in most states, workers remain unprotected while the scheme achieves only 54 per cent distribution coverage.
The government’s insistence that manual scavenging has been “eradicated” serves a strategic function. If the practice doesn’t officially exist, neither do the workers who perform it. This statistical erasure has devastating consequences. Approximately 40 per cent of sanitation workers in urban areas lack the employment identification documents necessary to access government welfare schemes, health insurance, and climate resilience programs. They are not in the system and therefore, when heat waves kill them, their deaths do not register as climate casualties.
The climate-caste nexus extends beyond heat. In Tamil Nadu’s devastating 2015 floods, research from the International Dalit Solidarity Network, Denmark found that 90 per cent of those injured were Dalits, and 95 per cent of the houses damaged belonged to Dalit families. These proportions were not accidental. Sanitation workers’ settlements are systematically located in low-lying areas near water bodies, places deemed unsuitable for dominant caste habitation.
Yet relief efforts systematically excluded these same communities. No Dalit families surveyed received shelter relief from the government despite their homes being the main casualties. Relief camps were set up in dominant caste villages, inaccessible to Dalit communities due to discrimination and distance. In 90 per cent of Dalit villages, there was no supply of safe water after the floods. Dalits in some villages have also explained that dominant caste persons have refused to allow them to take water from the sources owned by non-Dalits or in the dominant caste locations.
This pattern mirrors what Amnesty International documented in its October 2025 report on Dalit women sanitation workers in Bangladesh. In the coastal districts of Khulna and Satkhira, climate disasters are intensifying discrimination and rendering these workers more vulnerable. What Bangladesh faces, India mirrors. The climate crisis is not creating new forms of discrimination; it is weaponising existing hierarchies, making them lethal.
The intensification of climate vulnerability is not solely the result of rising temperatures; it is the deliberate policy choice of privatisation. In Chennai, over 2,000 sanitation workers have been protesting since August 2025 against the Greater Chennai Corporation’s decision to privatise waste collection. These workers earned Rs 22,590 per month under government employment. Under private contractors, their wages will drop to Rs 15,000—a 33 per cent pay cut.
The strike represents more than wage protest; it is resistance to a system that renders workers even more disposable. Under private contractors, accountability disappears. Insurance obligations vanish. Pension entitlements evaporate.
The climate-caste nexus cannot be addressed through heat action plans alone, or through better PPE distribution, or through incremental enforcement of existing laws. It demands fundamental restructuring like the formalisation of all sanitation work as permanent government employment with full social security, the criminalisation and prosecution of employers who deploy workers without safety equipment, the immediate implementation of mechanised sanitation systems across all Indian cities, and the integration of caste-disaggregated data into all climate adaptation planning.
It demands, most fundamentally, that the state acknowledge what it has systematically denied that India’s most marginalised workers are dying in the climate crisis not because they lack technical knowledge but because they are systematically excluded from the very institutions, protections, and resources designed to save lives.
The heat is rising. And India’s sanitation workers, invisible to policy, uncounted in statistics, excluded from protection—continue working, unseen, until the moment they collapse into a sewer from which no rescue is coming.
David Sathuluri is an anti-caste, climate justice, and human rights advocate who writes at the intersections of caste, climate, culture, philosophy, politics, and decolonial thought
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth