Sent into a sewer with no safety gear: Mumbai contractor held for culpable homicide after worker's death

Mumbai: A 47-year-old worker is dead and another is fighting for his life after the two men were sent into a municipal sewer chamber in Santacruz East without safety equipment, the latest deaths in India's long, unbroken chain of sewer fatalities. Santosh Ganpat Kashte, 47, and Ajay Dhyanchand Thakur were engaged in drainage clearance work outside the Bhavyaniketan Housing Society on TPS Road No. 8 on September 28. According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the housing society had hired private personnel, not civic employees, to clear its internal sewer line. A municipal sewer manhole on the road was allegedly opened without informing BMC staff, and the two workers entered the chamber. The Mumbai Fire Brigade pulled both men out and rushed them to V.N. Desai Hospital, where Kashte was declared brought dead. Thakur was admitted to the medical intensive care unit in critical condition. Police have arrested contractor Vilas Jadhav of Dadar East. The first information report charges him with culpable homicide not amounting to murder under Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, alongside Sections 125(a) and 125(b), and, crucially, Section 9 of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, the law that was supposed to end this exact kind of death. The FIR alleges that Jadhav removed the protective cover and grill of a chamber connected to the main drainage line under the BMC's H-East ward without prior permission, and sent the workers in without safety equipment. Police say they are probing how the workers were engaged and the circumstances of their entry into the municipal chamber; Kashte's post-mortem report is awaited. The Santacruz death is not an isolated accident. Days earlier, a 55-year-old labourer, Aslam Shaikh, died after falling into an open manhole on Khairani Road in Sakinaka during drain repair work in heavy rain. The BMC suspended four officials, including the 'L' ward assistant commissioner, ordered a high-level inquiry, and announced a 100 per cent safety inspection of manholes across all 26 wards. It will also file a police complaint against the contractor. Two men dead in Mumbai's drains within days of each other, and the pattern is depressingly familiar: informal workers, hired through contractors and housing societies, sent underground without protection, while the law that bans manual scavenging gathers dust. The 2013 Act made it a crime to employ anyone for hazardous cleaning of sewers without protective gear. Thirteen years later, the gear is still missing, and so, now, is Santosh Kashte.