Decentralized Governance and The Eradication of Manual Scavenging: A Socio-Legal Analysis

Even though the concept of untouchability was officially and constitutionally abolished, in India, although it is officially and legally outlawed, manual scavenging continues to be present. Not merely a failure of law as such but a more fundamental failure of governance which is caste hierarchies, institutional fragmentation and lack of local accountability. It is in this backdrop of decentralized governance that the present paper applies socio-legal analysis on issues surrounding manual scavenging in a bid to understand how the act has remained and how it may have been eliminated by the Panchayati Raj Institutions and Urban Local Bodies. It claims that the survival of manual scavenging is structurally connected with inefficiency of decentralization, functional, financial and administrative, but not the lack of legal norms. In evaluating not only the constitutional demands, but also the statutory demands, judicial claims, and also the practices at the ground level, the paper has established that the local institutions of governance are indeed the most significant yet least tapped areas of transformative change. The paper ends with a recommendation of governance based reforms that dwell on accountability, mechanization, social audits, and caste sensitive policy formulation with an endeavor geared towards making significant eradication of manual scavenging and restoring human dignity in India.