Manual scavenging was practised in India long before the British and other colonising countries arrived. Though it was the British who  established it as part of a modern system of urban sanitation  during the colonial era. During this time, the colonial state avoided any obligation to support  manual labourers with the quality tools needed to carry out the dangerous and dirty work .

The sanitation sector across in India and across the world has witnessed a major shift in the past few decades, seeing changes in sanitation work, due to the emergence of new technologies and laws. But still, many sanitation workers use the same means to conduct their work despite the technological advances.

In this new blog from the Towards Brown Gold project , we explore how sanitation work, workers and industry have evolved in one of  project's research location in Alleppey, Kerala .