Contempt, Constitution, and India's Manual Scavenging Crisis

On July 27, the Supreme Court once again did what it should never have had to do in a constitutional democracy: remind governments that human beings are still dying in sewers and septic tanks. Reports say the bench issued contempt notices to the chief secretaries of multiple states after taking serious note of continued deaths linked to manual scavenging and hazardous sewer cleaning, despite earlier directions intended to end the practice. The Court’s impatience was visible because this is not a new problem, not a hidden problem, and certainly not a problem without law. It is a problem without compliance.

The judgment-led fight against manual scavenging has been going on for decades, yet the country still returns to the same grim headline: another worker, another death, another official explanation, another promise of reform. The Court’s own language captures the moral weight of this failure. In the later line of authority on the subject, the Supreme Court said that “the practice of manual scavenging has to be brought to a close,” a sentence that is as much a constitutional command as it is a human cry.

That is why the July 27 order matters far beyond the courtroom. Manual scavenging is not merely an occupational hazard or a municipal lapse. It is a collapse of the Republic’s basic promise that every person has a right to life with dignity. The issue sits at the intersection of Article 21, which protects life and personal liberty, Article 17, which abolishes untouchability, and Article 14, which forbids unequal treatment by the state.

In the original 2014 Safai Karamchari Andolan case, the petition itself was framed under Article 32 as a plea to enforce the 1993 law and secure fundamental rights under Articles 14, 17, 21 and 47. That is important because it shows how the legal battle was never about sympathy alone. It was about the state’s constitutional duty to end a practice that belongs to a darker order of social hierarchy, one that modern law has repeatedly outlawed but modern governance still tolerates.

The history is not complicated, but it is damning. Parliament enacted the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act in 1993. The Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment in Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India did not merely observe that the law existed; it exposed how badly the law had been ignored. The Court noted that by 2003, a CAG report had already found that a rehabilitation scheme had failed after ten years of implementation despite an expenditure of more than Rs. 600 crore, that monitoring committees were non-functional, and that there was no evidence that persons “liberated” from scavenging were actually rehabilitated. That is the old Indian tragedy in one paragraph: a legal prohibition on paper, a welfare scheme on paper, and a human being still inside a manhole in real life. The judgment therefore did what law must do when administration fails it. It converted an ignored social evil into an enforceable constitutional wrong.

The story did not end there. In October 2023, in Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India, the Supreme Court issued a fresh set of directions to the Union, states and Union Territories. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment later told Parliament that the Court had ordered compensation for sewer deaths to be raised to Rs. 30 lakh, with a minimum of Rs. 10 lakh for disabilities and Rs. 20 lakh where permanent disability leaves the victim economically helpless. The same official reply said that states and Union Territories had been sent survey guidelines to conduct a fresh survey of manual scavengers, with district-level committees to be constituted for the purpose.

By December 2024, the government informed Parliament that 22 families had already received the enhanced compensation and that a mobile application and portal had been created for data capture, while 249 districts had uploaded certificates declaring themselves manual scavenger-free. Those numbers matter because they show both progress and fragility: compensation can be enhanced, portals can be built, and certificates can be uploaded, yet the practice still survives in the spaces between a certificate and a sewer line.

That fragility is exactly what made the July 27 contempt notices so significant. According to reports, the Court was told that 54 deaths were reported in the concerned states in 2024 and another 46 in 2025, despite the 2023 directions meant to end the practice. One report said the Chief Secretaries of 15 states were asked to explain why contempt should not be initiated for wilful disobedience; another early account described notices to multiple Chief Secretaries and linked the matter directly to the October 2023 directions.

The precise administrative framing may vary across reports, but the judicial message does not: the Court has moved from persuasion to accountability. That shift matters because contempt is not theatre. It is the legal vocabulary of a court saying that enough time has been given, enough law has been written, enough policy has been announced, and enough bodies have been buried. When the bench asks why officials should not face proceedings for wilful disobedience, it is doing more than expressing frustration. It is testing whether the executive still believes constitutional commands are optional.

The deeper question, however, is not why courts keep intervening. It is why the executive keeps lagging. One reason is that manual scavenging survives in the administrative shadows where responsibility is always one layer below the real decision-maker. Municipal bodies blame contractors. Contractors blame supervisors. Supervisors blame workers who “chose” the job. Police often delay FIRs. Compensation gets routed through paperwork while the family gets routed through grief. Another reason is that the state still treats sanitation as a low-visibility service and low-status labour, which means it is often outsourced, fragmented and under-monitored.

A third reason is that official reporting systems have a built-in incentive to undercount what is embarrassing to count. If a district calls itself free of manual scavenging, the story becomes one of success. If a death occurs after that declaration, the story becomes one of exception. But repeated exceptions are not exceptions; they are evidence. The law does not fail because the Constitution lacks words. It fails because the machinery of the state is too willing to let cruelty hide inside routine.

This is why the social justice angle cannot be separated from the administrative law angle. Manual scavenging persists where enforcement is weak, where inspections are rare, where punishments are never personal, and where public bodies assume that compensation after death is an acceptable substitute for prevention before death. It is not. The 2013 Act criminalises the practice, but criminalisation is only the starting point. A law that bans a dehumanising act must also create a credible chain of detection, prosecution, and rehabilitation. If that chain breaks at the first link, the law becomes ceremonial.

The Court’s repeated interventions since 2014 show that it understands this. The 2025 press note from the National Human Rights Commission, for instance, urged all states and Union Territories to implement the Supreme Court’s 14 directives from the 2023 judgment immediately. That is a striking measure of the problem: even after a landmark constitutional order, another national institution still has to remind governments to follow it.

What should change now is not more moral language, but tighter systems. Every sewer or septic-tank entry should require a digitally recorded work permit with named supervisory approval, and no entry should be treated as valid unless safety equipment is logged and verified. Every death or injury should trigger automatic FIR registration, not discretionary paperwork. Every contractor engaged by a public body should be subject to blacklisting, personal penalty recovery, and a public compliance audit.

Every urban local body should maintain a live dashboard of sewer-related work, deaths, injuries, rehabilitation payments and pending prosecutions, so that the state cannot hide behind aggregate numbers. The answer is also technological, but technology must be used as prevention, not as publicity. Robotic cleaning, jetting machines, desilting equipment, better protective gear and mechanised alternatives should be the default, not the exception reserved for elite localities. The most basic principle is simple: if a machine can do the job, no human being should be sent down to breathe poison for wages that barely buy dignity.

Equally important is the human side of enforcement. Manual scavenging is sustained not only by weak institutions but by caste prejudice that still leaks into the state’s everyday functioning. That is why the legal fight cannot be reduced to a sanitation reform campaign. It is a dignity campaign. It is about the social value of the worker at the end of the chain, the person who cleans what others refuse to see, and the family that inherits not just poverty but stigma. For that reason, rehabilitation must mean more than compensation. It must include skills training, alternate livelihoods, education support for children, housing security, health coverage and access to local employment that does not trap people back into the same humiliating work. The Court can order the state to pay; the state must build a future in which payment is no longer the only response available. Without rehabilitation, compensation becomes an admission fee to repeated failure. With rehabilitation, it becomes part of a real exit from bondage.

There is also a role for citizens, lawyers, journalists and civil society, because implementation often begins where routine administration ends. PILs remain essential where district systems fail. RTI applications can expose missing surveys, unspent funds, and non-functional monitoring committees. Contempt petitions can keep old directions alive when official enthusiasm fades. Local advocates can help families secure compensation and ensure that FIRs are not buried. Journalists can continue naming the gap between “free” districts and dead workers. NGOs and unions can push for social audits that compare declared compliance with actual field conditions. This is not a glamorous fight. It is a persistent one, carried forward by paperwork, pressure and public memory. But that is often how constitutional rights become real in India: not because the state suddenly becomes conscientious, but because enough people make neglect inconvenient.

The Supreme Court’s July 27 order should therefore be read as something larger than a contempt notice. It is a warning that the judiciary is no longer willing to let manual scavenging be treated as an unfortunate residue of the past. It is a present-tense constitutional offence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That sentence fits this issue with painful precision, because every sewer death in India tells us something about the quality of justice in the republic as a whole. A state that cannot protect the people it sends into toxic waste is not merely failing sanitation policy; it is failing the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. The law has already spoken. Parliament has already legislated. The Court has already ordered. What remains is the hardest part, and the only part that truly counts: making sure no one is ever again forced to risk death to clean away the nation’s shame.