A Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) P Sathasivam has ruled in a writ petition on people disposing human waste manually from dry toilets, granting Rs 10 lakh compensation each to families of manual scavengers who died in sewers, manholes or septic tanks since 1993, after the work was outlawed by law, which was further strengthened in September of last year.

The SC also ordered better schemes for rehabilitation of workers who would be doing an illegal job under the law, and told the Indian Railways, which is the largest employer of manual scavengers, of whom the majority are from the dalit castes, to stop the practice. [Mint] [Judgment W.P.(C) 583/2003] [January NYT feature on the manual scavenging law]