Abstract
In India, the implementation of the Bio-medical Waste Management Rules (2016) by the Government of India, notwithstanding, the safe handling, segregation, treatment, and disposal of biomedical waste have remained below acceptable global standards. India produced more than 150–200 metric tonnes of COVID-19–related biomedical waste per day during the peaks of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Healthcare sanitation workers, predominantly contracted from among socioeconomically, culturally, and politically marginalised Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes, experienced a heightened risk of hospital-acquired infections and injuries in the absence of adequate provisions of personal protective equipment and sanitation supplies. As a marginalised workforce, they continued to remain on the fringes of labour welfare legislation and occupational safety and health policies despite their enhanced risk profiles and close contact with infected waste. This paper undertook a critical analysis of the public health and safety policies, labour legislations, and human rights instruments signed by the Government of India vis-à-vis their applicability to healthcare sanitation work to assess the human and labour rights violations of this essential workforce. As the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 no longer a ‘public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)’ in May 2023, lessons on the essentiality of these occupations for public health, the systemic casteist and gendered exclusion of the workers from labour welfare, and their consequent invisibilisation in labour legislation and occupational health and safety policies are analysed to evaluate the role and scope of social work practice to safeguard and foreground their human rights and welfare.