Every year, dozens of Indian sanitation workers die while cleaning sewers and septic tanks by hand — a practice banned by law but still common in cities where mechanised alternatives haven’t reached. Toxic gases like methane and hydrogen sulphide, oxygen-starved manholes, and unsafe descents make manual scavenging one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Now a wave of young Indian engineers, several of them IIT graduates, are trying to make it obsolete — one robot at a time.
From Classrooms to Manholes
The story follows a familiar arc: an engineering student, often from a smaller town, sees the human cost of manual sewer cleaning up close and decides to build a machine that can do the job instead. The pitch is simple — a remote-operated robot goes where no person should have to, using mechanical arms, grabbers, or suction systems to clear blockages, sludge, and debris.
The best-known example is Bandicoot, developed by Genrobotics, a startup founded in Kerala in 2015 by a group of engineering graduates. Shaped loosely like a spider, Bandicoot is lowered into a manhole on a frame, where its robotic limbs use a camera feed to locate blockages and a bucket-and-claw mechanism to scoop out waste — work that would otherwise take a human crew hours to do by hand, and at serious risk to their health. The Kerala government adopted it as an official alternative to manual scavenging, and the technology has since been exported to other Indian states and abroad.
Similar efforts have followed elsewhere. At IIT Guwahati, an incubated startup called BetaTank Robotics — founded by an alumnus who once worked on oil tankers — built robots to clean the sludge inside crude oil storage tanks, another confined, hazardous space traditionally cleaned by human workers. Municipal corporations in cities like Chandigarh have also begun budgeting for sewer-cleaning robots as part of a broader push to comply with national guidelines banning manual scavenging.
Why It Matters
India outlawed manual scavenging under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, and the Supreme Court reinforced the ban the following year. Yet enforcement has lagged: sewage networks cover only a fraction of urban India, and where they do exist, mechanised cleaning equipment is often too expensive or too scarce for local bodies to deploy at scale. Sanitation workers — many from marginalised communities — continue to be sent into manholes with little more than a rope and a bucket.
Robotics startups argue that automation isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about dignity and survival. A machine can be replaced if it fails inside a manhole. A person cannot.
The Business Case
What makes these startups notable isn’t just the engineering — it’s that they’re increasingly being treated as viable businesses, not just social ventures. Government contracts, state sanitation missions, and municipal procurement budgets have begun flowing toward companies building this technology, and some have attracted early-stage venture funding as investors bet that mandated compliance with anti-manual-scavenging laws will create a durable, government-backed market.
Whether any single startup reaches a headline-grabbing valuation or not, the broader trend is real: a small but growing cluster of Indian engineers — many trained at the IITs — are betting that robots, not human bodies, should be the ones going down into the sewers.