More than 220 Bandicoot robots have been deployed in India, says Vipin Govind, head of marketing and communications at Genrobotics. The company’s reach, he says, enables “even resource-constrained municipalities” to deploy the technology effectively.
Despite these technological options, a 2021 report by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment found that there are still more than 58,000 manual scavengers across India. Independent observers say the numbers are even higher.
The machine that Jitender uses is mounted on a pickup truck and uses rotating rods, high-pressure streams of water, and a mechanical claw to break up blockages and remove debris. “Earlier, a sanitation worker would get into a sewer and clear the drain with some equipment, but now with these machines we just drop the nozzle into the drain and turn on the pump,” he says. But Vijay Shehriyar, part of the same Delhi initiative, explains that the machines have not entirely replaced manual scavenging in the city. “The manual cleaning is still employed at many places, especially in narrow lanes,” he says.
Bezwada Wilson, an activist who has long campaigned for the eradication of manual scavenging, explains that most of the drainage and sewage systems across the country are not well planned and were built without proper engineering oversight. Any solution would need to take into consideration all the resulting differences in infrastructure, he says: “It can’t be that you come up with an alternative and force it upon the drainage system without understanding its nature.”
Hamaad Habibullah is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.