Sewage Deaths in Vidarbha: A Decade of Neglect and Unseen Tragedies

thenewsdirt
7 days ago
13 min read

In July 2025, a routine drain-cleaning assignment in Nagpur turned fatal for a 30-year-old sanitation worker.

The worker, Shruti Uke, was clearing a clogged drain as part of monsoon preparations when a dilapidated brick wall suddenly collapsed on her, killing her on the spot. This incident cast a harsh light on the safety conditions for those maintaining Vidarbha’s sanitation systems.

Over the past decade, numerous workers in this region of eastern Maharashtra have lost their lives while cleaning sewers, septic tanks, and drains. These sewage-related deaths keep occurring despite laws meant to prevent such hazards, raising serious questions about enforcement on the ground.

Each tragedy underscores a grim reality: basic safety measures are often missing, and the people tasked with keeping cities clean are paying with their lives.

Recurring Fatalities Amid Negligence

Vidarbha has witnessed a pattern of deadly accidents involving sanitation workers. The Nagpur drain disaster in 2025 was not an isolated case. In March 2022, three men, two contract labourers and a supervisor, died after inhaling toxic fumes while cleaning an underground septic tank in Chandrapur district.

They had entered the tank, located in a residential colony of Western Coalfields Limited, without any protective gear. Within minutes, all three were overcome by noxious gases and lost consciousness.

A co-worker who tried to save them also collapsed, and by the time rescuers arrived, the three workers were dead. Safety equipment was entirely absent. No gas masks, no harnesses, not even gloves were provided by the private contractor. “The accident could have been avoided if the labourers were provided safety equipment,” observed a trade union leader, as he condemned the complete lack of precautions at the site.

Local authorities later confirmed that basic protective gear had indeed not been given to the men, a stark failure that turned a routine maintenance job into a deadly trap.

Nagpur, the largest city in Vidarbha, has seen its own share of such horrors. Four years before the Chandrapur tragedy, Nagpur witnessed a similar incident. In April 2018, three sanitation workers died inside a 12-foot-deep well on the premises of a city mall while they were attempting to clean it. One by one, the workers descended to remove a water pump and were fatally asphyxiated by toxic gases accumulating in the pit. The city police later filed negligence charges against five people, including the mall’s owner, acknowledging that a lack of safety measures led to those deaths. More recently, local media in Amravati reported an incident in 2021 where two municipal workers collapsed inside a sewer line, allegedly due to poisonous gas inhalation, highlighting that these dangers are not confined to a single district.

From Nagpur to Chandrapur to Amravati, the storyline has been disturbingly consistent: sanitation staff sent into confined, toxic environments with inadequate preparation and no protective gear. Each time, the result is multiple workers left dead or critical, families plunged into grief, and officials “launching probes” after the fact.

These recurring fatalities point to chronic neglect of safety protocols. Manual scavenging, the practice of humans entering sewers or septic tanks to clean them, is officially banned, yet it effectively continues under hazardous guises.

Whether cleaning a clogged city drain or an apartment septic pit, workers often face the same life-threatening conditions. The 2025 Nagpur wall-collapse case illustrates that even tasks like drain cleaning can be perilous if proper precautions are not in place.

In each tragedy, investigations have revealed preventable causes such as a lack of oxygen supply, high levels of poisonous sewer gas, or structurally unsafe work sites.

The loss of life in these cases is made more painful by the knowledge that simple preventive steps, providing gas masks, ensuring ventilation, and enforcing basic training, could have averted disaster.

Safety Laws on Paper vs. Ground Reality

India has laws intended to protect sanitation workers, but in Vidarbha, those protections often exist only on paper.

The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, strictly bans employing any person for manual cleaning of sewers or septic tanks without proper protective equipment.

It prescribes jail terms and fines for officials or contractors who violate this law. In theory, no worker should be entering a toxic sewer in the 2020s, and any entity sending someone inside without gear is committing a crime.

In practice, however, enforcement of this act has been feeble. Across Maharashtra, there are hardly any cases of officials or contractors being prosecuted when a sanitation worker dies on the job, even in blatantly illegal circumstances.

Many local authorities have failed to even acknowledge the presence of manual scavenging in their jurisdictions, which allows them to skirt reporting requirements. Government audits have found that several districts, including some in Vidarbha, did not report having any “insanitary latrines” or any manual scavengers, essentially declaring themselves free of the problem.

This administrative denial creates a dangerous blind spot. Hazardous practices can continue unchecked because, on paper, they simply don’t exist.

The disconnect between official claims and ground reality is stark. The central government has repeatedly asserted in recent years that manual scavenging has been eradicated. Yet day-to-day conditions tell a different story.

Independent surveys and social audits continue to document instances of workers being sent into pits and tanks without any safety equipment, which, by definition, is manual scavenging under the 2013 Act. A union government-commissioned audit in Maharashtra examined sanitation work sites between 2021 and 2024 and found that basic safety protocols were widely flouted. Workers were still being made to clean sewers and septic tanks with no protective gear, no emergency kits, and no training or supervision in place. Several deadly accidents in that period were directly attributed to toxic gas inhalation, in clear violation of the law that forbids hazardous manual cleaning.

“As long as workers are entering septic tanks without protective gear, it is nothing but manual scavenging,” said a state coordinator of the Maharashtra Social Audit Society in an interview about these findings. His point underlines the reality in regions like Vidarbha: despite the official ban, manual scavenging persists in effect.

No matter what terminology authorities use, sending humans into confined sewage spaces without safeguards is both illegal and lethal. Yet, because enforcement is so weak, this practice continues largely unchecked.

There is also a near-total absence of accountability when things go wrong. Even in fatal incidents that clearly involve unlawful conditions, it is rare for any official or contractor to face serious consequences.

The lack of legal action sends a message that safety laws can be ignored with impunity.

Frontline workers in Vidarbha, many of whom are employed through informal contracts, are well aware that if they refuse dangerous assignments, they risk losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, those higher up the chain seldom worry about being held liable for endangering lives. This gulf between law and reality means that the risk of death remains an everyday part of sanitation work in Vidarbha, despite paper guarantees to the contrary.

Data Gaps and Compensation Delays

One factor perpetuating this crisis is the poor documentation and acknowledgement of incidents, which makes the true scale of the problem easy to ignore.

Government surveys present only state-level figures. For instance, a national survey in 2018 identified 7,378 people engaged in manual scavenging in Maharashtra.

However, that survey did not specify how many of those workers were in Vidarbha as opposed to other parts of the state. Similarly, a mobile app launched in 2020 to report insanitary latrines and manual cleaning cases recorded zero confirmed cases in Maharashtra, which suggests either perfect compliance or, far more likely, a severe underreporting issue.

The National Commission for Safai Karmacharis also publishes only statewide totals for sanitation worker deaths and has not provided any Vidarbha-specific breakdown.

This lack of granular data means that when workers die in a town like Chandrapur or Amravati, it does not necessarily trigger alarms in Mumbai or Delhi. The incidents blend into aggregated statistics, or sometimes are not recorded at all due to the denial mentioned earlier.

Activists believe the true number of sewage-related deaths in Vidarbha is higher than reported, based on local news and community reports, but getting official confirmation is difficult. In other words, the absence of data does not mean an absence of incidents, it means they are flying under the radar.

What we do know from consolidated figures is alarming enough. By the government’s own admission, hundreds of Indians have died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks in recent years.

Central data presented to Parliament showed at least 339 such deaths nationwide in the five-year period from 2018 through 2022. Maharashtra consistently ranks among the states reporting fatalities. In 2022 alone, official data recorded a dozen deaths in Maharashtra due to hazardous sewer or septic tank cleaning. If we broaden the lens, the numbers climb further.

According to national records, a total of 1,064 sanitation workers died in India between 1993 and 2023 while doing this work, and Maharashtra accounted for 56 of those deaths. Social advocates argue that even these figures may be undercounts, noting that some accidents get reported under generic terms like “industrial mishap” or not at all. The lack of region-specific records has meant that Vidarbha’s ongoing tragedies garner little statewide or national attention. A fatal accident in a small municipal town may only be noted in a local news blurb, and no comprehensive record ensures patterns are recognised and addressed.

Beyond the data gaps, another glaring issue is the failure to deliver timely compensation and support to the families of fallen workers. Both law and court judgments mandate that when a sanitation worker dies on duty, their next of kin should receive financial compensation. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India directed that ₹10 lakh be given as ex gratia compensation for any death caused by sewer or septic tank cleaning.

Maharashtra’s government has since announced an increase of this amount to ₹30 lakh per death in recent policy updates. Yet these promises often do not translate into reality for the victims’ families, especially not in a timely manner. According to state government data, 30 people died while cleaning sewers or septic tanks in Maharashtra between 2017 and 2021, but only 11 of those victims’ families had received the mandated ₹10 lakh compensation as of late 2022.

In other words, about 63% of bereaved families in that five-year span were still waiting for the aid they are legally entitled to. The backlog includes cases from multiple regions, likely Vidarbha among them, given that activists have identified several fatalities in this region during that period.

Official breakdowns by district are unavailable, but it is clear that many widows and children have been left without the financial support that might help them rebuild their lives after losing a breadwinner.

A stark illustration of delayed justice is the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic in Nagpur. During the pandemic, sanitation workers were pressed into service to disinfect public areas, hospitals, and even assist in handling the deceased. This put them at high risk of infection. In Nagpur city alone, 54 municipal sanitation workers reportedly died from COVID-19 and related occupational exposures while serving on these frontlines.

The Maharashtra government publicly lauded these workers as martyrs and announced a generous compensation of ₹50 lakh to the family of each deceased worker. However, nearly three years later, most of those families have seen nothing close to that amount.

By early 2025, out of all the Nagpur families who lost someone, only two had received any portion of the state’s ₹50 lakh compensation.

Instead of the full payout, the government had disbursed a lump sum of ₹2 crore for the entire state as of February 2025, which, divided among dozens of claimant families, would amount to just a few lakh rupees each. Facing such a shortfall, Nagpur’s municipal corporation itself stepped in and provided ₹10 lakh per family from its own budget as interim relief, and by March 2025, 32 families in the city had received this smaller ex-gratia payment.

Even so, this interim aid is only a fraction of what was promised, and many victims’ dependents elsewhere remain in financial limbo. The pattern is depressingly familiar: after the headlines fade, families find themselves fighting bureaucratic battles to get the compensation that was trumpeted in press releases.

For those coming from economically weak communities, as most sanitation workers in Vidarbha do, such delays are devastating.

They often lack the savings or social support to cope with the sudden loss of income, and they also typically cannot afford legal action to prod the government into action. The end result is that even the safety net designed to ease the impact of these tragedies has large holes, compounding the human cost of each death.

Mechanisation Drive and Ongoing Risks

Faced with continued deaths, authorities have launched new initiatives to eliminate hazardous manual cleaning, but progress on the ground has been slow.

In 2023, the central government rolled out a scheme called NAMASTE (National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem), which aims to modernise sanitation work and ensure “zero fatalities” in sewer and septic tank cleaning operations.

The scheme is funding mechanised equipment and training across the country, targeting around 100,000 sewer workers in 4,800 urban local bodies. Maharashtra, being one of the states with a high number of sanitation workers, has been a major focus under NAMASTE.

As of mid-2023, Maharashtra had identified 7,649 active sewer and septic tank cleaners to enrol in the program, the second-highest in India after Uttar Pradesh. However, the distribution of these identified workers within Maharashtra is unclear due to the same data aggregation issues mentioned earlier. It is not publicly known how many of those thousands of workers are in Vidarbha specifically, since official reports did not disaggregate the figures by region.

On paper, Vidarbha’s cities have begun implementing NAMASTE. In Nagpur, the municipal corporation has profiled roughly 2,485 sanitation workers for coverage under the scheme. The authorities there have started distributing Personal Protective Equipment kits to these workers and issuing health insurance cards under the program.

This is a positive step, as access to proper gear like breathing apparatuses, safety harnesses, and medical cover can directly save lives. Yet, the persistence of fatal incidents even after the scheme’s launch shows that real-world conditions have yet to substantially change. The death of Shruti Uke in Nagpur in July 2025, for instance, happened a full year after NAMASTE was introduced. She was working for the city corporation at the time, presumably one of the very workers the scheme is meant to protect, and still her team lacked an awareness of the structural hazard that killed her. Similarly, hazardous manual cleaning has not vanished. In late 2024 and early 2025, reports from various Maharashtrian cities noted workers still entering sewers without adequate precautions, indicating that the mechanisation drive has yet to reach all worksites.

A cornerstone of the NAMASTE scheme is the creation of Emergency Response Sanitation Units in every district. These units are supposed to function like a fire brigade for sewer work, a dedicated crew of trained professionals on call with specialised equipment to safely handle sewer blockages and rescue operations.

In theory, if a sewer line needs cleaning in a Vidarbha town, the ERSU would intervene using suction machines, protective gear, and strict protocols, thereby removing any need for untrained workers to descend into toxic manholes. The Maharashtra government even mandated that all urban local bodies set up these ERSUs and advertised a toll-free 24x7 helpline for reporting any unsafe sanitation work. However, on the ground in Vidarbha, most of these promised units exist only in name. Local journalists and activists describe the implementation as patchy at best.

Many municipal bodies in the region have yet to procure the advanced equipment or hire the specialist staff that an ERSU requires. In places where an emergency unit nominally exists, it often lacks vehicles or funds to operate effectively.

The dedicated helpline, which is meant to dispatch these units, has been reported as unresponsive or ill-equipped to handle real emergencies. In essence, while the frameworks for safer practices are being put in place, the capacity to carry them out is still catching up. Until those gaps are filled, regular sanitation staff, often poorly trained and lightly equipped, continue to shoulder the dangerous tasks.

Maharashtra’s state government has acknowledged the severity of the issue, and parallel to NAMASTE, it announced a state-level initiative dubbed “Manhole to Machinehole.”

This program, with an estimated budget of ₹400 crore, is focused on purchasing robotic sewer-cleaning machines and deploying them in cities and towns statewide. The idea is to minimise human entry into manholes by using remote-operated devices to clear blockages.

It also includes funding for safety audits and training modules to instil a culture of safety among the sanitation workforce. Such measures, if fully implemented, could be game-changers for regions like Vidarbha, where many municipalities still rely on antiquated infrastructure. However, the transition to mechanisation is in its early stages, and past experience raises concerns about execution. Large funds and plans do not always translate to quick action on the ground.

As of the most recent reports, smaller Vidarbha cities like Akola, Yavatmal, and Chandrapur were still waiting to receive modern sewer-cleaning machines and training modules under these schemes. Some local officials candidly admit that without continuous oversight and political will, well-intended plans may not reach the grassroots workers who need them most.

Meanwhile, those who actually perform sanitation work continue to face daily risks. The workforce often comes from marginalised communities, and many are employed on a temporary or contractual basis. This makes it harder for them to demand safer conditions. Union leaders in Nagpur have pointed out that outsourced contract workers tend to receive the most dangerous duties without proper training, yet have the least job security or voice to protest.

While mechanisation promises to remove the worst dangers eventually, current workers still report lacking even basic items like gloves, boots, or gas detectors on the job. Change on paper has not yet fully trickled down to change on the street. Until it does, every clogged sewer or overflowing septic tank in Vidarbha presents a potential flashpoint for another tragedy. The true test of initiatives like NAMASTE and Machinehole will be whether fatalities start to fall to zero in the coming years, the goal that officials have set but which remains far from achieved today. For now, sanitation workers in Vidarbha still brace themselves whenever they climb down into a manhole or enter a dark pit, knowing that the safety net beneath them is thin.

The past decade’s record of sewage-related deaths in Vidarbha is a stark reminder of the human cost of systemic neglect. From big cities like Nagpur to smaller towns dotting the region, those tasked with cleaning our waste have too often met with death in the line of duty. This has occurred despite laws that ban hazardous manual cleaning and despite loud proclamations that “no one should die in a sewer” in modern India.

Each fatal incident exposes the gulf between policy and practice, between what is supposed to happen and what actually does. The recurring tragedies and their aftermath paint a sobering picture. Rules and equipment alone cannot save lives if they are not actually enforced and utilised where they matter.

Vidarbha’s experience shows that progress in paper protocols means little as long as workers at the ground level are still descending into toxic pits without protection.

As new machines are procured and new policies rolled out, the real measure of success will be preventing these needless deaths once and for all. Until that goal is reached, every sanitation worker climbing down a manhole in Vidarbha does so with the unspoken reality that they are risking their life to keep the public spaces clean.