125 dead in India's sewers and septic tanks this year, and the state calls it an accident

At least 125 people have died this year while doing some of the most dangerous work in India: entering sewers, septic tanks, sewage treatment plants, manholes and other confined spaces to clean, repair and unblock them.

The count comes from the Dalit Adivasi Shakti Adhikar Manch (DASAM), which said in a statement issued in New Delhi on October 5 that it had documented 125 deaths linked to hazardous sanitation and confined-space work across 20 states and Union Territories between January and October 2, 2026.

The dead include sanitation workers, manual scavengers, contract labourers, construction workers and migrant workers. DASAM said the incidents expose caste-based occupational exclusion, contractor exploitation, informal employment, institutional negligence, weak enforcement of the law and a continuing failure to mechanise hazardous sanitation work.

The organisation rejected the familiar official language of accident. When a worker is lowered into a space where toxic gases can build up and oxygen can vanish, without gas detectors, breathing apparatus or a rescue plan, death is not a surprise. It is the predictable outcome of a system that still treats some lives as disposable. DASAM described the recurring pattern in which one worker collapses inside a tank or chamber and another, sent in without protection to rescue the first, is overcome by the same poisoned air. Men die in pairs and threes, trying to save each other.

None of this is legally ambiguous. Manual scavenging is prohibited in India, and the law requires rehabilitation of those forced into the work. The Supreme Court has repeatedly directed governments to mechanise hazardous sanitation cleaning and to compensate the families of workers who are killed. Yet, thirteen years after the 2013 law, workers are still being sent underground with ropes instead of machines.

Earlier this year, the Safai Karamchari Andolan counted 1,726 deaths in sewers and septic tanks since that law came into force, with the heaviest tolls in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Delhi, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. The new DASAM count suggests the curve is not bending. One hundred and twenty-five deaths in nine months is a worker dying roughly every other day, in work that no one should be asked to do with their bare hands.

The question the report puts to every government, municipal body and contractor is simple. The technology to clean a sewer without a human being inside it exists. The law exists. The court orders exist. What does not exist, DASAM argues, is the will to spend money and enforce rules for workers drawn overwhelmingly from oppressed caste communities. Until that changes, each new count will read like the last one, only longer.