New Delhi: The Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA) has questioned the government’s silence and delays in ending manual scavenging in India. Highlighting the death of 101 people across the country since January 2026 while engaged in manually cleaning sewers and septic tanks, SKA said that its figure – 121 deaths for the whole of 2025 – showed the situation was worsening.“Needless to say, Dalit lives don’t matter for government and they have turned into a new normal,” Bezwada Wilson, a Magsaysay Prize awardee and head of the SKA, said in a statement.The NGO’s figures show an “alarming” rise in the number of deaths in sewers and septic tanks ever since manual scavenging was banned by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013.“In 2016, only 39 deaths were reported, which jumped by 350% next year in 2017 to 137 deaths,” said the statement. It said over 1,726 deaths have been reported across the country since 2013. It said a sanitation worker’s death is being reported while cleaning sewers and septic tanks, on average, “every 45 hours”, while governments choose “shameless” silence.“We demand that our Prime Minister immediately announce a complete stop to deaths inside sewers and septic tanks,” it said.Governments in denialWilson pointed out that the government has been denying sewer deaths though they were still taking place, more than a decade after the practice was outlawed.“No death has been reported due to manual scavenging, which is lifting of human excreta from insanitary latrines,” the government of India told parliament in 2023. “Further, no report from States/UTs has been received about the inhuman practice of manual scavenging,” Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Ramdas Athawale said in parliament.A press release issued by the government based on this parliament (Rajya Sabha) response said in October 2023 that out of 766 districts, only 249 – fewer than 35% – had declared themselves manual scavengers-free “and uploaded the certificate on portal”.At the same time, in 2018, the Delhi government admitted that manual scavenging was ongoing in the capital, while the Superme Court asked the Union government to correctly assess the situation.The SKA statement records 12 deaths in Delhi-NCR, which are part of the “horrific” increase in cases across the country. It said 16 states had reported such deaths so far in 2026, an indication of the spread of the problem.Complete ban on dry toilets and manual cleaningBezwada Wilson spent four decades battling the practice through SKA’s activism, a social movement and a court case (related to a 1993 law that has also proved ineffective in ending the scourge) before manual scavenging could be outlawed, without exception and across the country, by the 2013 law.Both the 1993 and 2013 laws are in place, seeking to address separate aspects of the practice: employment of people to clean sewers and septic tanks manually as well as building of dry toilets, etc., both of which perpetuate the practice.The statement also criticised state governments for not taking action to prevent manual scavenging and said it had expected better response to the law.Of the 1,726 deaths since 2013, 1,203 were just from Tamil Nadu (332), Gujarat (216), Delhi-NCR (157), Maharashtra (155), Uttar Pradesh (148), Haryana (104) and Bihar (94). “Despite such big numbers, none of these states have taken a single step to stop these deaths,” the statement said.State governments complicitThe SKA statement was also critical of the government’s flagship ‘Swachh Bharat‘ scheme to build toilets across the country as well as of the scheme for mechanised cleaning of drainage systems, saying they neither mechanised the sanitation ecosystem nor completely eliminated dry toilets.Wilson said the failure of governments to elimitate the practice showed “how much they value the lives of safai karamcharis, who are still considered to be untouchable”.In 2019, the Supreme Court had come down heavily on the Union government over ambiguity in eradication of manual scavenging and passed an order banning the practice in six metropolitan cities. It had said it was “sick” of trying to get the Union and state governments to implement the 1993 law.India ranks very poorly in terms of its global sanitation status, for which are responsible lack of scientific cleaning methods and planning and caste- and gender-based inequality, as acknowledged by UNICEF, the Indian government’s partner in Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, in 2020.A survey by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment revealed in 2024 that 91.9% of the 38,000 sanitation workers profiled (thus far) belonged to a Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Classes.