Cleaning Latrines by Hand: ‘How Could Any Human Do That?’

When he came to fully realize exactly what his parents and older brother did for a living, and what it likely meant for his own future, Bezwada Wilson says he was so angry he contemplated suicide.

His family members, and his broader community, were manual scavengers, tasked with cleaning by hand human excrement from dry latrines at a government-run gold mine in southern India.

While his parents had tried hard to hide from their youngest child the nature of their work as long as they could — telling Mr. Bezwada they were sweepers — as a student Mr. Bezwada knew his classmates viewed him with cruel condescension. He just didn’t know the reason.

“In my growing up years, I was made to feel different from the rest in school. I was not allowed to laugh at jokes, and caste slurs were thrown at me,” Mr. Bezwada said in an interview on a recent evening in Delhi. “All I wanted to know then was why was my community different, and how could I make them equal to the others?”

By the time he was 18 or so, the young man of course knew what his community did to put food on the table, but his knowledge was still only theoretical. He wanted to experience the work for himself.

So he urged some manual scavengers to take him on the job. He watched them reach way down into a pit to scrape dried human waste from toilet floors, piling it into iron buckets and then transferring it into a trolley to be dumped on the mining township’s outskirts.

As he observed, one man’s bucket fell into the pit. The man rolled up his pants before dropping down into ankle-deep waste to to pull the bucket out.

“I shouted, cried and implored him to not do so. How could any human do that?” Mr. Bezwada recalled.

The night of that incident, furious about what he had witnessed, he spent hours sitting by a water tank, thinking about jumping in to end his life.

“The sound of the water was consistent. But what I could hear in my mind was a ‘no, don’t die. Live on and fight,’” Mr. Bezwada recalled.

And he has, for the last four decades.

Every morning, Mr. Bezwada, now 57, wakes up with a single-minded mission: to unshackle his community from the centuries-old scourge linked to their caste.

“My community did not realize that this is not what they were born to do,” Mr. Bezwada said, “but were made to do by society and government.”

The movement he founded in 1993, Safai Karmachari Andolan, or Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers, is now one of the largest organizations in India fighting against caste discrimination.

While such discrimination is illegal in India, almost all the country’s sanitation workers who deal with human excrement, including those who clean septic tanks and sewers, are from the lowest caste rung in their communities.

In addition to the social stigma, such work can be extremely dangerous: In enclosed spaces, human waste can create a mix of toxic gases, which can result in loss of consciousness and death for those forced to breathe in the foul air for extended periods.

Mr. Bezwada’s Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers movement has recorded over 1,300 sanitation worker deaths since the early 1990s.

After his own near-death experience at the water tank, Mr. Bezwada kept talking to community members at the Kolar Gold Fields in the state of Karnataka, where 114 dry latrine cleaners and about 1,000 sanitary workers overall were among the approximately 90,000 employees.

He discovered manual scavenging was not a local issue but an all-India problem. So he started writing letters, including to Karnataka’s chief minister and to the prime minister of India. He arranged for a camera through a friend and started documenting the situation at the mine, which was closed in 2001.

Communists were active at the camp, frequently staging demonstrations for higher wages, and Mr. Bezwada said he learned how to protest from them.

There were many days where he was the only one protesting, and his mother urged him to end his activism. “‘Forget it. We will move out,’” he said she told him.

His breakthrough moment came when a journalist contacted him for a story on the continued existence of dry toilets in the gold mining township, which officials claimed were no longer there. After the article ran, Mr. Bezwada found himself all over the news. Government officials wanted to inspect the situation themselves, and Mr. Bezwada was called on to show them around.

In an effort to raise awareness beyond the gold mine, Mr. Bezwada started visiting other cities and towns, traveling by bus at night, trying to mobilize the manual scavenger communities he encountered and talking to them about “how to come out of it,” he said.

A chance meeting with a retired bureaucrat in the early 1990s helped formalize his Campaign of the Cleanliness Workers movement, leading to both donations and volunteers.

Since the campaign started, and especially over the last decade, dry latrines have largely been eliminated in India, although Mr. Bezwada said they can still be found in rural and semi-urban parts of some states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. He said he won’t be satisfied until there isn’t a single person picking up waste by hand.

In addition to working to eradicate any remaining dry latrines and replace them with flush toilets, Mr. Bezwada’s movement also trains former manual scavengers in other lines of work, like tailoring, gardening and auto rickshaw driving, and it advocates safer working conditions for all waste workers.

In 2023, at least 90 sanitary workers in India died on the job, Mr. Bezwada said. From 2017 to 2022, 373 people are reported to have died cleaning hazardous sewers and septic tanks, according to government data.

Mr. Bezwada said his politics were shaped by the architect of India’s Constitution, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, who himself belonged to Mr. Bezwada’s Dalit caste. It was by reading Mr. Ambedkar, Mr. Bezwada said, that his anger shifted from his community for not resisting, toward society and the government for pushing his caste into inhumane jobs.

“They were doing it to protect the interests of the elite and upper castes,” Mr. Bezwada explained.

Even after nonprofits began supporting his work, Mr. Bezwada still traveled on the cheap, often sleeping at a bus station and covering himself with the newspapers he loved to read during the day for warmth at night.

He mobilized manual scavengers and presented letters to municipalities demanding they demolish the town’s dry toilets. If towns refused, sometimes Mr. Bezwada and his volunteers would take matters into their own hands.

“We would take crow bars and start breaking them,” he said.

In 1993, he and his volunteers started documenting the existence of dry latrines across India and recording each manual scavenger’s death on the job. In 2003, the organization filed a petition in India’s top court asking for strict enforcement of a law passed in the early 1990s that was meant to eradicate manual scavenging in India but was widely ignored.

It wasn’t until 2014 that the court finally acted: It ordered state governments to pay compensation to families of those who had died cleaning sewers and septic tanks; to take stringent measures to stop manual cleaning of dry latrines; and to retrain people engaged in manual scavenging with skills that would give them the means for a more dignified livelihood.

In 2016 he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called the Nobel Prize for Asia.

“I had no proper education. But loads of real-life wisdom,” Mr. Bezwada said, assessing the reasons for his success.

However agonizingly long the wait for the court’s decision, the time was put to good use.

“The community got organized in the process,” Mr. Bezwada said. “That’s the reward. Even if I go quiet, today there are thousands who are speaking up.”

One recent afternoon, a group of volunteers huddled in his Delhi office for a meeting.

Mr. Bezwada was coaching them on the fine art of full-throated sloganeering for the ongoing campaign against sewer worker deaths.

“Nobody can win without putting up a fight,” Mr. Bezwada told them. “Whatever victory has come in the world so far, it is all through the struggle and fight only. But every fight may not yield a result. What’s important is the fight.”