Each dawn, Bengaluru’s 15,000–16,500 pourakarmikas enter the spaces from which the city turns its face. As they sweep, segregate, and collect nearly 5,000 tonnes of waste the city generates daily, they are routinely exposed to infectious pathogens, biohazards, dust, and toxins without adequate protection. Yet, despite being the first line of defence against disease outbreaks, they remain invisible in the city’s public health architecture.
The state’s decision to invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) in the name of public health thus rests on a troubling paradox. Policies that undermine sanitation workers’ rights, safety, and ability to organise for fair conditions do not safeguard community health — they endanger it. When workers fall ill from constant exposure to pathogens, respiratory toxins, and ergonomic strain, the effects ripple outward: uncollected waste accumulates, disease vectors multiply, and the city’s resilience to public health crises weakens.
Protecting the occupational health and safety of sanitation workers is not a labour issue alone — it is a public health imperative and a question of health equity. In a growing urban metropolis like Bengaluru, where dengue, diarrhoeal infections, and respiratory diseases already strain the healthcare system, neglecting the well-being of those who keep the city clean undermines the very foundation of disease prevention.
Healthy workers mean healthier communities. Conversely, when exploitation is institutionalised under laws like ESMA, it is the city’s collective health that pays the price.
The government argues that uninterrupted garbage collection is essential to prevent outbreaks of dengue, diarrhoea, and respiratory illness. On paper, that logic is sound. In practice, it misses the point: public health collapses when the workers upholding it fall ill.
Pourakarmikas handle biomedical and household waste daily, often without gloves or boots. There is no occupational health policy tailored to them, no routine medical check-ups, no monitoring to ensure protective gear, and no grievance redressal mechanism when wages are delayed for months.
Karnataka’s public health planning rarely names sanitation workers as frontline health actors. Yet, without their protection, the city’s disease prevention system is built on exhausted bodies. The World Health Organisation has repeatedly warned that sanitation workers face “some of the most unsafe conditions of any occupational group.”
Still, India lacks a national framework to keep them safe.
ESMA was designed for extraordinary emergencies — wars, pandemics, and insurgencies. Once invoked, any strike in an “essential service” becomes a criminal offence. Using such a blunt instrument to silence Bengaluru’s pourakarmikas betrays the absence of structural reform.
The law enforces continuity of service but preserves the imbalance of power. Workers cannot strike; contractors remain free to delay wages, ignore safety requirements, and evade accountability. ESMA keeps garbage off the streets — but it cannot keep infection out of workers’ lungs or equity in their contracts.
Karnataka’s civic bodies routinely outsource waste management to private operators under opaque contracts. The state saves money; workers lose rights. ESMA cements this arrangement by criminalising the only bargaining tool workers have ever had — collective protest.
Tamil Nadu offers a glimpse of where this path leads. In Chennai, conservancy workers have repeatedly gone on strike over months of unpaid wages and the lack of protective gear. Even after the state repealed its own ESMA in 2006, officials continued to invoke the Central Act to force workers back to the streets. Each time, garbage was cleared — but the root causes of the protests remained untouched.
It is a pattern Bengaluru is repeating: fix the symptom (garbage piles) and ignore the disease (precarity and neglect). By invoking ESMA without creating labour courts, arbitration panels, or contractor penalties, the state is silencing workers instead of solving the problem.
Garbage is politically visible. Sick workers are not.
When waste piles up, news cameras arrive. When a pourakarmika collapses from heat stroke or contracts hepatitis from bare-handed segregation, there is silence. Occupational diseases — respiratory infections, urinary tract infections from lack of toilet breaks, chronic pain, depression from caste-based discrimination — rarely make headlines.
Yet these “private” illnesses are public health failures.
A weakened workforce means higher absenteeism and a real risk of sanitation collapse. A city’s first epidemic is not the one that fills hospitals — it is the one that empties its streets of workers.
Other nations show that protecting essential services does not require stripping workers of their rights.
In France, the state can mandate minimum waste-collection levels during strikes but still upholds the right to collective bargaining. In South Africa, employers are legally obliged to supply protective equipment and face penalties for failures — a framework that explicitly covers sanitation staff. During COVID-19, Brazilian municipalities went further by granting sanitation workers priority access to PPE and vaccines, recognising them as frontline responders.
These examples prove a simple truth: continuity of service and protection of workers are not contradictions. They are co-dependencies. Cities that defend their sanitation workers’ rights end up defending their own resilience.
If Bengaluru is serious about public health, it must move beyond coercion. ESMA may keep garbage off the streets, but it cannot build a healthy sanitation system.
Direct municipal employment, transparent wage systems with penalties for delays, occupational health units providing regular check-ups, mental health support, and independent grievance redressal mechanisms are urgent necessities.
Most importantly, workers must have a voice in shaping the policies that govern their lives.
The state now calls sanitation work an “essential service.” But recognition without rights rings hollow. Bengaluru cannot be a healthy city while those who clean it remain sick, unsafe, and silenced.
History shows that every gain pourakarmikas have made — from minimum wages to safety gear — was won through collective action. By invoking ESMA, the state is not just criminalising protest; it is rewriting that history of resistance.
The question is no longer whether sanitation is essential. It is whether the lives of sanitation workers are essential too. Until Bengaluru can answer “yes,” its clean streets will remain a façade — and its conscience, unclean.
Meher Suri is a public health practitioner exploring intersections of government, civil society, and people’s movements to advance intersectional, trauma-informed, and equity-driven research that authentically centres participant voices.
Views expressed are the author's own.