Essential workers are the hidden beating heart of our cities they clean their streets, empty their sewers, and remove their waste. And yet the people who perform these indispensable tasks are among the most dehumanized in the country, not only because of poverty, but also because of caste.
For centuries, the logic of the caste system has designated certain communities as inherently "polluted," and in doing so, locked them into occupations that the rest of society depends on but refuses to acknowledge with dignity.
B.R. Ambedkar said that the caste system is not merely a division of labour but a division of labourers because it does not just assign tasks, it assigns worth.
Under the Hindu caste hierarchy, Dalits, "untouchables," were consigned to occupations involving contact with human waste, death, and filth. Valmiki, Bhangi, Mehtar, and Arunthathiyar have performed sanitation work not by choice but by caste decree, passed down across generations through social coercion and economic exclusion. According to a government survey conducted in 23-24 covering 29 states, approximately 92 percent of those engaged in cleaning urban sewers and septic tanks belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backward Class communities. The numbers confirm that this work is still overwhelmingly caste-based.
Workers enter manholes without protective equipment and die from asphyxiating gases at a documented rate of roughly one death every five days. It is estimated that hundreds die annually, yet not a single person has been convicted of abetting manual scavenging.
Manual scavenging, the practice of cleaning human excreta from dry latrines, open drains, and septic tanks by hand, was banned by Indian law in 1993 and yet again in 2013. But it persists in virtually every state.
The state is simultaneously the prosecutor, the employer, and the perpetrator. Deaths are routinely reclassified as "accidents" or attributed to "hazardous cleaning," a bureaucratic sleight of hand that erases the caste violence at the root of the practice. According to an academic study in the American Ethnologist, the transformation of sewage infrastructure into an "alibi" for caste-based death reveals how contractual liberalism and the caste system share a common interest in displacing risk onto Dalit bodies.
In the modern day, where the practice of discrimination based on the caste system is banned, casteist attitudes manifest in the daily working life.
In cities like Ahmedabad and Surat, research by the Centre for Labour Research and Action found that Valmiki sanitation workers were made to sit on the ground during events while dominant-caste colleagues occupied chairs.
Supervisors from upper castes routinely displayed what workers themselves described as "insensitive and casteist behaviour."
Lower caste workers were denied protective gear, refused overtime pay, and excluded from permanent employment rolls.
Dominant-caste workers increasingly occupy permanent roles such as peons and attendants, while Dalit workers are pushed into contractual positions at wages as low as INR 200 250 per day. If that is not discrimination, what is?
Workers who attempt to leave the sector describe being refused admission for their children at private schools once their occupation is known or their caste certificate is given. Those who try to open their own businesses say that customers stop visiting once their caste is revealed.
The varasdar system, which entitles the next of kin of deceased or injured workers to a municipal job, offers a form of economic security, but it also chains families to sanitation work.
A worker holding a BCom degree inherited his mother's position and was offered only a cleaner's role. Occupational mobility is not obstructed by qualification but by caste.
During the Pandemic Our country celebrated its frontline workers with clapping drives, garlands, and online tributes. Sanitation workers were among those briefly lionized as essential heroes. The structural conditions that make these workers "essential" are the same ones that make them invisible.
They are indispensable precisely because no one from a dominant caste is willing to do the work, and they remain unprotected precisely because caste makes their suffering legible only as misfortune, not the injustice we all know it to be.
India cannot claim a sanitised public space while refusing to sanitise the attitude that keeps its own essential workers degraded.
CONCLUSION In conclusion, the plight of essential workers underscores a deep-rooted social injustice that persists in our society to this day. Despite their vital contributions, these individuals remain trapped in a vicious cycle of dehumanization and economic inequality.
It is imperative that we recognize the dignity of all labor and actively work towards dismantling the caste-based discrimination that perpetuates such disparities. Dismantling casteist attitudes towards essential workers is not a welfare question but a constitutional one.
It requires enforceable labour rights, occupational mobility, and, most fundamentally, an honest reckoning with what the caste system has always demanded, that lower people carry the burden of everyone else's waste so that the upper caste may remain clean.