“Nothing can bring my son back. Compensation or not, this work is hazardous and no one should be put through this hazardous occupation,” said Kiran, whose son Chand died on June 26 after entering a septic tank at a factory in Delhi’s Mundka.

Chand was not alone. Sandeep and Arun also died while cleaning the septic tank that day.

The three families eventually received the Rs 30 lakh they were each owed in August, nearly two months after the deaths. But Kiran said getting the money was anything but simple. The families made repeated rounds of local government offices and had to lean on officials before the payout was cleared.

“After their deaths, we had to struggle to get compensation for our families. It is our right and will help us get back on our feet. I have two other sons who have families and this money will help us. However, we had to press the authorities several times to get the compensation,” she told Newslaundry.

The delay Kiran describes is far from unique. Across Delhi, the families of workers who die cleaning sewers and septic tanks routinely wait months – and sometimes years – for money that is legally theirs. The government has laws and schemes meant to end such deaths and to support the bereaved, but activists say it is the grieving families who are left to navigate a slow bureaucracy.

In its landmark October 2023 judgment in Dr Balram Singh v Union of India, the Supreme Court raised the compensation for deaths caused by manual scavenging and hazardous sewer cleaning to Rs 30 lakh, up from the earlier norm of Rs 10 lakh. The sum is to be paid by the responsible government agency and, in Delhi, is routed to families through the district administration – the offices of District Magistrates and Sub-Divisional Magistrates. The court has stressed that the money should reach families quickly; in March 2025, hearing a clutch of sewer-death cases from Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, it ordered the four metropolitan authorities to release the full Rs 30 lakh – the compensation payable under the 2013 Act – to the next of kin of workers who had died in the preceding three months, within four weeks. Yet families continue to face delays.

Manual scavenging has been illegal in India since the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. Even so, sanitation workers are still pushed into dangerous cleaning jobs, sent down into sewers and septic tanks without the protective gear the law requires, often on informal,........

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