On December 13 last year, the union government told the Lok Sabha that 48 people died in 2022 due to “accidents while undertaking hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks”.
Of the 48, the highest number of deaths were reported in Haryana (13), followed by Maharashtra (12) and Tamil Nadu (10). Importantly, this is different from the legal definition of manual scavenging in India, which involves cleaning human excreta from dry latrines.
