Sanitation Work and Spatial Injustice: Caste, Labour, and Urban Exclusion

Abstract

This paper critically explores the intersection of caste, labour, and spatial marginalisation to understand the persistent exclusion of sanitation workers in contemporary urban India. Despite being essential to maintaining urban hygiene and public health, sanitation workers—disproportionately drawn from Dalit communities—remain among the most socially and spatially marginalised urban populations. The paper situates sanitation work within the broader structures of caste-based occupational hierarchy, analysing how historical stigmas and entrenched social prejudices continue to shape these workers' living and working conditions. Urban development policies, innovative city initiatives, and infrastructure planning often overlook or actively displace sanitation workers, relegating them to informal settlements with inadequate access to housing, water, sanitation, and healthcare. Drawing on fieldwork insights, government reports, and secondary literature, this paper uncovers how spatial injustice is both a consequence and a reinforcement of social exclusion. Despite legal prohibitions, it also examines the lack of legal safeguards, the precarity of contractual labour, and the invisibility of manual scavenging practices. The paper strongly advocates for a rights-based and participatory approach to urban governance that centres sanitation workers lived realities and voices, emphasising the need to include them in decision-making processes. It concludes by suggesting policy frameworks rooted in social justice and dignity to address the systemic inequalities entrenched in urban space, labour, and caste.