Overview
Delhi’s sanitation infrastructure depends, to a degree rarely acknowledged, on a workforce that operates between 11 pm and 6 am. Night-shift sanitation workers — sewer cleaners, garbage collectors, street sweepers deployed in the early morning hours — work in conditions that are dangerous, socially invisible, and poorly documented.
Workers in the Shadows is a longitudinal study of 280 night-shift sanitation workers employed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and by private contractors operating on MCD’s behalf. The study ran for three years, with interviews and income-expenditure tracking conducted annually. The findings were published in Economic and Political Weekly in July 2021.
Why Night-Shift Sanitation Work
Sanitation work is one of the few sectors where caste-based occupational segregation is visible in administrative records — caste categories appear in employment rolls of municipal corporations across India. Night-shift allocation within sanitation departments compounds the disadvantage: night shifts are disproportionately staffed by contract workers, who have fewer protections, and by workers from Scheduled Castes and marginalised communities, who have less bargaining power over shift assignment.
The hazards of sanitation work — chemical exposure, biological contamination, physical injury — are well documented in theory and systematically undocumented in practice. We found no single municipality in the study with a functioning occupational health registry for sanitation workers.
Study Design
We enrolled 280 workers at the outset of the study in 2018. Workers were contacted annually for three rounds of structured interviews. By the third round, 241 workers (86%) remained in the study.
Workers were sampled across three categories: permanent MCD employees, contract workers under MCD’s outsourcing arrangements, and contract workers employed by private operators on MCD-supervised routes.
Income and expenditure data was collected using a monthly recall method with a printed calendar instrument, cross-checked against pay slips and bank passbooks where available.
Health data was self-reported, supplemented by records from ESI dispensaries attended by workers. We documented incident reports — injuries, hospitalisations, deaths — through both worker accounts and RTI requests to MCD.
Key Findings
Income and Security
The income gap between permanent and contract workers was stark and widening. In 2018, permanent MCD workers earned a median ₹22,000/month; contract workers earned ₹9,500–11,000/month for equivalent or more demanding work. By 2021, the gap had grown, as permanent worker salaries increased through 7th Pay Commission implementation while contract wages were adjusted only once.
Income volatility was high among contract workers — 61% reported at least one month in the preceding year where they received less than contracted wages, typically due to attendance deductions for sick days.
Occupational Health
Musculoskeletal injury was near-universal. 83% of workers over 40 reported chronic back pain; 67% reported knee pain. Very few had received any form of occupational health assessment.
Respiratory symptoms consistent with occupational exposure — chronic cough, breathlessness — were reported by 44% of workers. Workers in sewer-cleaning roles reported the highest rates. None had received baseline pulmonary function tests.
Skin conditions were reported by 38% of workers who handled wet waste. Protective equipment — gloves, masks, boots — was provided inconsistently and was frequently of inadequate quality. Workers commonly purchased their own equipment at personal expense.
Over the three-year period, we documented 12 deaths among the 280 study participants or their close relatives employed in sanitation work. Causes included sewer gas asphyxiation (2), road traffic accidents during night-shift collection (4), and illness attributed by families to occupational exposure (6). None of the deaths attributed to occupational causes had generated a formal employer liability claim.
Social Conditions
Night-shift work creates particular social strains. Workers described strained family relationships, difficulty attending children’s school events, and reduced community participation. Childcare during night shifts was managed through arrangements with neighbours or relatives — never through employer-provided or employer-subsidised childcare.
Workers reported high social stigma, even among neighbours who depended on their work. Several described not telling children what they did until the children were in secondary school.
Publication and Impact
The EPW article generated responses from MCD administrators, contractor associations, and sanitation worker unions. We were invited to present findings to a Delhi High Court-appointed committee examining working conditions in sanitation.
Our recommendations — baseline health assessments, equipment standardisation, parity in wage revision for contract workers, and mandatory incident reporting — were incorporated into the committee’s interim report. Implementation has been partial.
A Hindi summary of the findings was distributed to worker collectives in Delhi and has been used in union training sessions.
The Long View
We maintain contact with a subset of the original study cohort. The pandemic years — 2020–21 — were catastrophic for contract workers: many lost employment when contractors withdrew; those who worked were redeployed without additional compensation or protection. A short follow-up paper on the pandemic’s differential impact on permanent versus contract sanitation workers is in preparation.
Study conducted by Anshu Jha and a co-investigator at the Centre for Labour Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. Published in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 56, No. 29, July 2021. Supported by a research grant from the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).