Across India’s overcrowded prisons, where more than 5.7 lakh people are confined at an average occupancy rate of over 131 percent, a quiet but entrenched form of violence continues unchecked.
It is not the spectacle of riots or brutality, but the slow, routine violence of caste. It operates through everyday prison labour, through classifications embedded in jail manuals, and through language that continues to rank dignity and work according to inherited social status.
As the Supreme Court’s 2025 report Prisons in India: Mapping Prison Manuals and Measures for Reformation and Decongestion makes clear, nowhere is this structural injustice more visible than in the persistence of manual scavenging and caste-based labour allocation inside prisons.
Not Mere Administrative Oversight
Despite constitutional guarantees under Articles 14, 17 and 21, despite the prohibition under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Acts of 1993 and 2013, and despite explicit judicial directions in Sukanya Shantha vs Union of India (2024), prison administrations across India continue to compel inmates — disproportionately from Scheduled Castes, Denotified Tribes, and other marginalised communities — to clean latrines, drains, and sewers by hand.
As the Supreme Court’s report documents, several states still admit that prison drains and sewers are cleaned manually, often with nothing more than gloves or bleaching powder, citing lack of mechanised alternatives.
In a constitutional democracy, this is not an administrative oversight. It is a direct constitutional breach by the State in spaces it fully controls.
The roots of this injustice are historical and institutional. As the Court’s report traces in detail, colonial prison administration consciously incorporated caste hierarchies into penal governance.
Nineteenth-century jail committees held that forcing prisoners of “higher castes” to perform manual labour would amount to cruelty, while prisoners from “lower castes” were expected to continue their hereditary occupations inside jail walls.
Food, labour, bathing, and even segregation were organised to prevent “loss of caste.” This logic was codified into provincial jail manuals and carried forward almost intact into Independence.
This story was originally published in thequint.com. Read the full story here.