Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Safai Karmachari Andolan informed the Supreme Court that in 2021 on a daily basis approximately 4.97 lakh dry toilets were serviced by animals and 7.94 lakh were serviced manually. An article in the Hindustan Times of 8 January 2021 (India News, 2021) proposed that the government provides every manual scavenger 10 lakh so that each might liberate himself/herself from the occupation and adopt an alternate livelihood. In 1993, 2012 and 2013, three acts were proposed for reformation and rehabilitation of manual scavengers but little to no rehabilitation has occurred. There are scant government records of scavengers or sanitation workers available. According to the 2011 census, manual scavenging is categorized as a domain of unskilled work performed by unorganized labour. This article addresses the categorization of manual scavengers as sanitation workers, the social exclusion criteria for sanitation workers and how robotic technology can rehabilitate sanitation workers and uplift them socially. The article relies on semi-structured interviews conducted in two demographic regions of Haryana state in India where robotic technology is currently being used.