THE 2025 annual report of the Citizens’ Commission for Equality and Human Rights states that over 100 sanitation workers die while cleaning human excreta in the raw sewage gutters of Pakistan every year. Regrettably, multiple lives must be lost in a single incident for the tragedy to draw the media’s attention. The three sanitation workers who died in Usmanabad, Karachi, in September 2025, and the three family members who died in Surjani Town, Karachi, on April 17, 2026, are a case in point. The fact that the last name of those who die is invariably ‘Masih’ has no significance and rings no bells in the dull minds of our callous bureaucrats. We collectively stand guilty of murder by neglect and discrimination.
The most significant change in the international safety management standard ISO 45001 (compared to older safety standards like OHSAS 18001) is that the top management is now directly accountable for safety. They simply cannot delegate safety to a ‘safety officer’ and walk away. Clause 5.1 of the standard explicitly states that the senior leadership is responsible for preventing work-related injuries and providing a safe workplace. Many countries, in response to this requirement, have passed laws that hold the top management personally liable for safety. The directors and senior executives can now face heavy fines or even imprisonment if a worker is killed or seriously injured due to their negligence. The UK’s Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, 2007, Australia’s Industrial Manslaughter law, Canada’s Criminal Code (Bill C-45) and Singapore’s WSH Act can result in chief executives facing prison sentences of up to 20 years.
Pakistan, in stark contrast, is stuck in a ‘leniency unlimited’ mode when it comes to protecting its negligent and law-violating senior management. Occupational injuries and deaths, even when rooted in gross neglect and incompetence, are falsely projected as ‘pre-ordained’ and quietly settled with a token payment of a few thousand rupees to the families of deceased workers. The September 2025 deaths of three sanitation workers in Usmanabad were compensated with a meagre amount of Rs600,000 — an official valuation of Rs200,000 per life. In both the Usmanabad and Surjani Town cases, the state made sure that no FIR was registered against its own criminally negligent officials.
It is obvious that the mayor, the union council and the MDs of water utilities KWSC and Wasa are responsible for these crimes. The sanitation workers are sent into suicidal sewage gutters without a single piece of safety equipment that could provide even a faint possibility of survival. The workers are invariably private individuals and not the employees of KWSC (or Wasa) — the ones paid by the taxpayers to do this job. The much-repeated slogan of ‘safety kits’ is a farce and a placebo to continue this criminal practice. There is not a single government agency here that is equipped with or understands the legal and safety requirements for ‘confined space’ entry, such as ‘written entry permits’, documenting entry and exit, environmental testing, communication equipment, breathing apparatus, tripod and winch for lowering and raising and a rescue plan for emergencies. Because of these strict requirements, entry into confined spaces is globally authorised only in rare situations such as major structural repairs or specialised engineering tasks and not for routine blockages.
Sanitation workers are sent into gutters without safety gear.
Pakistan urgently needs to legislate a complete ban on all manual scavenging and human entry into sewers. If India’s supreme court can do so, why not the courts or parliament of Pakistan? The head of the organisation sending a person into a sewer gutter should be liable for a prison sentence. This function ought to be replaced by deploying locally fabricated jetting, rodding, suction and grabbing machines. Sanitation jobs ought to be an equal-opportunity employment, and at least half the workers must be Muslims. Every sanitation worker (government or private) must be insured by the state for at least Rs10 million. In case of injury or death, it must be mandatory for the state to register an FIR against the CEO of the agency executing the task. As all sewage gutters and lines are the property and responsibility of the government, only the full-time employees of government organisations (and not privately contracted workers) must undertake this function.
Will our rulers and heads of sanitation departments please step down from their Gulfstreams and Fortuners, and experience a descent into a raw sewage gutter to understand the nature of its filth and indignity? Must that be necessary before our lawmakers enact a complete ban on entry into sewage gutters?
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2026