On the evening of May 19, 2025, at the height of an Indian summer, four men climbed into a seven-foot-deep sewage tank at a dyeing factory in Tiruppur in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. They had no masks, harnesses, or gas monitors. Three of the four, all young members of the Dalit subcaste, never came out. For generations, Dalits, those once branded “untouchable,” have almost exclusively taken on this kind of work. The young men in Tiruppur died how sanitation workers in India die every few weeks: overcome by gases gathered in sealed tanks.
These deaths persist despite India outlawing manual scavenging, that is cleaning human waste by hand, twice, once in 1993 and again in 2013. Similarly, its Constitution abolished untouchability in 1950. And yet, 76 years later, these men still go down into the tanks.
Manual scavenging, caste, and the “just transition”
As the world warms, governments have promised a “just transition”: fair ways of moving workers out of dying industries so that, for instance, coal miners and oil workers are not simply discarded as their jobs disappear. It is one of the few genuinely popular ideas in climate politics. At last year’s climate summit in Belém, governments agreed to build an international mechanism to deliver a just transition; delegates would settle the design during meetings in June 2026 and put it forward for adoption at COP 31 in November 2026. Right now, in other words, the world is deciding who the just transition is for.
The difficulty, however, is that the idea of a just transition was built around workers with “dirty” jobs that they might lose. As part of a just transition, they would be recompensed, retrained, and moved into “clean,” or at least cleaner, jobs. The manual scavenger does not fit this model. The worker here is not losing a dirty job. Rather, they are being held in one by birth. They do not need a soft landing as they move out of a fading industry. They need release from an inherited status that ties them to a dirty job from birth. There are two distinct but related problems here—and the mechanism of the just transition only aims to address the first.
India shows how easily the second problem can be made to vanish. The government completely denies the existence of manual scavengers and yet acknowledges the deaths of hundreds of individuals cleaning sewers and septic tanks. It settles this contradiction by renaming the dead. They were not manual scavengers, the state says, but “sanitation workers” undertaking “hazardous cleaning,” and it adds that it keeps no record of their castes. Despite the government’s own survey findings that more than nine in ten of these workers belonged to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and other backward classes, the ministry insists that the work is not caste-based. By recording the deaths as safety failures, the government is choosing to skirt the real problem in favor of one more easily resolved.
Changing contexts: mechanization and the climate economy
The official remedy for this dilemma is to use machines. India has promised to mechanize sewer cleaning, and several states have bought robots. Some launched these robots alongside announcements that manual scavenging is finished, clarifying the connection. Machines that keep human beings out of toxic tanks are worth having, and no one should romanticize the alternative. However, mechanization on its own simply changes the task without changing who performs it. Again and again, the same families stay in sanitation work, now driving the truck or minding the machine. And they are still the ones sent in when the machine falls short. The caste line survives this technological upgrade.
There is a further turn that speaks directly to the climate crisis. Human waste is becoming valuable. Under the banner of the “circular economy,” excrement is now a resource: biogas, fertilizer, reclaimed water. Climate finance is beginning, slowly, to move toward sanitation as cities try to adapt to heat and flooding. This money could fund the exit promised to manual scavengers for decades. But it could just as easily do the opposite.
If whoever owns the plant and holds the contract reaps the financial benefits of climate transition, workers will shoulder the dangers of waste management and benefit from none of its value. Waste pickers elsewhere in the Global South already know this pattern. As rubbish becomes a business, corporations push them out of the same circular economies they made possible. There is, as they put it, no circularity without them.
Toward a just transition for all
The problem of manual scavenging is not an Indian footnote to a Northern debate. It is an actual test of the word “just” in “just transition.” There isn’t much justice, truly, in a transition that helps some workers in fading industries in wealthy countries and passes over the people doing the most dangerous work in poor ones. The mechanism being designed this year could define the just transition differently. It could treat informal and caste-bound sanitation work as a problem demanding a just transition. Success here would look like finally ending an inherited occupation and insisting that when waste is turned into money, the money reaches the workers first.
In a conference hall, negotiators will soon meet again to decide what a just transition includes. Elsewhere, a man will lower himself into a toxic tank without a mask because it is the only work his birth has left him. That is no part of a just transition.