EP Deep Dive: Data & Solutions
After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood
In Wayanad, part of the ecologically fragile Western Ghats, a school at Vellarmala had no training in trauma recovery when the landslide hit — so its teachers built their own response, one now echoed by research and by disaster-recovery efforts in Nepal and the Philippines. What worked, what it took, and where it still falls short for the next school this happens to.
On the morning of July 30, 2024, one of Kerala’s deadliest landslides tore through Chooralmala and Mundakkai in Wayanad. As hillsides collapsed under relentless monsoon rain, entire neighbourhoods were swept away, killing 298 people. Among the dead were 33 students from the Vellarmala Government Vocational Higher Secondary School (VHSS). The school campus itself disappeared beneath mud and boulders, taking with it classrooms, a playground, a library and years of childhood memory.
When classes resumed months later, the children had a school again — but not the one they remembered. Friends were missing. Familiar surroundings were gone. The laughter that once filled the corridors was buried alongside students who never returned.
That was when the teachers realised they were not simply reopening a school. They were helping children rebuild a childhood that a disaster had shattered.
When Learning Had to Wait
The Meppadi school today has 331 students and 28 teachers. But in the weeks after the landslide, when the school community was still grappling with loss and displacement, the staff knew that returning to textbooks could not be the first priority.
Ninety-seven students from Classes 1 to 10 had been directly affected by the landslide — either injured, displaced, or bereaved — split almost evenly between girls and boys. Others had lost relatives or friends, including classmates who sat beside them every day. For the first month, the school itself was pressed into service as a relief camp. With the original campus destroyed, students were relocated to the kitchen and dining hall of another school compound.
For two months, academics were set aside entirely. Instead, the teachers focused on one thing: keeping the children together, and giving them a routine. Students arrived in the morning, ate breakfast and lunch, took part in activities, had evening snacks, and stayed through the day.
“We did not give the students a chance to overthink anything,” Unnikrishnan, a teacher who has worked at the school for 20 years, told EdPublica.
But even with the children physically back together, something was missing. “Both children and teachers have a sense of sadness regarding the disaster,” the headmistress Jesna Jose told EdPublica. “Even though they don’t show it often, we can feel it.” The children were together again. The school did not yet sound like itself.
Then Came the Smile
The change began with something that had nothing to do with textbooks.
Two teachers from a government school in Pathanamthitta, a district in south-central Kerala—Manoj Sini and K.S. Binu—arrived at Vellarmala dressed as clowns. They walked into a Class 1 classroom, played music, and began performing comic routines. The children laughed. Then the teachers laughed too.
“All of a sudden, the children started laughing. Seeing the children laugh, the teachers also started laughing,” Unnikrishnan recalls. It was a small moment. But after months of grief, it meant something far larger.
“That’s when we understood that art was the medicine,” he says.
The insight that followed was a quiet but important one: recovery did not have to begin with talking about the disaster. Sometimes, it could begin with giving children a reason to laugh.
“Once there was a smile, we could carry things forward. That was the turning point in rebuilding the school.”
Finding What Each Child Could Do
From there, the teachers began looking beyond what the children had lost and toward what they still had to rebuild the childhood.
They individually studied the 97 directly affected students to identify their interests and abilities. Some were drawn to craft, others to computers, art, sport, or science. Children were grouped by interest, and outside experts were brought in to train them — many arriving without any fee, through the teachers’ own personal networks and friendships.
The school became, for a period, a working studio of drama, oppana (a traditional Muslim wedding dance performed by women), nadan pattu (Kerala folk songs) and vanjippattu (traditional boat songs). A science expert ran demonstrations. A craft teacher introduced bookbinding and art. Students were entered into science exhibitions and arts festivals.
This was not simply keeping children occupied. It was giving them a structured way to discover themselves again — and it is the detail that separates what happened at Vellarmala from a generic “art therapy helped” narrative: the intervention was individually mapped, expert-led, and sustained, not a single feel-good workshop.
The results reached a public stage. Students from the school delivered the first dance programme at the State School Art Festival, and later performed Vellapokkathil (In the Flood) at the Kerala State School Youth Festival 2024 — all seven performers survivors of the Chooralmala landslide themselves.
Based on a story by the Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, the play depicts communities and animals caught in a catastrophic flood. For the students performing it, the story was inseparable from what they had lived through months earlier — making the performance both intensely personal and difficult to watch as fiction.
Where Research Meets the Ground
What the Vellarmala teachers arrived at through instinct and trial finds independent confirmation in a study published in 2025 in the journal Development in Practice. Researcher V. Akhila and colleagues, drawing on direct involvement in the relief camps set up after the landslide, documented the same emotional terrain the teachers describe: survivors carrying acute guilt at having lived when neighbours and family did not, a disruption to “sense of security, identity, and hope,” and heightened anxiety, sleep disturbance and fear that did not resolve quickly.
The study examines the toll on first responders, many of whom were themselves survivors or had lost people they knew, and who were frequently deployed into relief work without any prior debriefing — carrying the emotional weight of that period into their daily lives long afterward. It is a reminder that “recovery” in a disaster zone is not a category that applies only to the visibly affected; it extends to everyone who worked to hold the response together, including, arguably, teachers like Unnikrishnan.
The researchers also flag something the Vellarmala experience illustrates directly: that mental health impacts fall unevenly across a population — hitting children, older residents, people with disabilities, and those relocated from outside the immediate community hardest — and that longer-term psychological support after landslides remains patchy and poorly coordinated almost everywhere it has been studied.
When Grief Returned
But there is no single fix for what these students had endured. The return of laughter did not mean the children had forgotten what happened.
As the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate, Kerala’s Grade 10 board examination) approached, seven students — three girls and four boys — told their teachers they did not want to sit the exam. Many of the friends who should have been sitting beside them had died in the landslide, and the exam hall itself was a reminder of who was missing.
The teachers went to each of the seven students’ homes and persuaded them, one by one, to take the examination. They did. The school went on to record a 100 percent pass rate. At the farewell ceremony that followed, many students cried uncontrollably.
The episode is the clearest evidence that recovery here was never a straight line. There could be laughter one day and grief returning without warning the next. What the teachers had learned by then was not to expect children to simply “move on.” They stayed present through the difficult moments, and kept building spaces where students could learn, participate and be heard.
“Teachers gave them 24-hour support,” Unnikrishnan says. “It was survival. It was also a challenge for the teachers.”
Children and Disasters: A Global Problem
What happened at Chooralmala is a single, closely observed instance of a far larger pattern. UNICEF’s most recent global analysis found that at least 242 million students across 85 countries and territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in a single year — 2024 — through heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods and droughts. At least one in seven students worldwide experienced some form of climate-linked disruption to their education that year.
South Asia was the worst-affected region, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruption in 2024 alone; heatwaves by themselves affected an estimated 171 million students globally. The disruption is rarely confined to missed classes. Extreme heat and other hazards damage school infrastructure, make the route to school unsafe, and measurably affect children’s concentration, memory and physical and mental health — the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of harm.
The scale behind these numbers is worth sitting with. A 2024 narrative review co-authored by researchers at the World Health Organization, synthesising over a decade of peer-reviewed evidence on climate change and child health, notes that 2022 alone saw 387 climate-related disasters worldwide — storms, floods, wildfires and droughts — that killed more than 30,000 people.
The review’s consistent finding across the literature it examined is that these events measurably affect children’s mental and physical health, nutrition, safety, learning, and the caregiving relationships that hold a childhood together — precisely the five domains Vellarmala’s teachers found themselves rebuilding one at a time.
Speaking to EdPublica, Dr Kavitha G. Bhaskaran, a guest faculty member in the Department of Psychology and Disaster Management at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, said children exposed to recurrent landslides can experience withdrawal, fear, nightmares and a loss of interest in activities they once enjoyed, along with a lasting fear of loud sounds, rain or even the night itself.
Dr Upasona Ghosh, Technical Expert–Climate Change and Health at the Centre for Environmental Health and a member of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Expert Group on Environmental Determinants of Health and Climate Change, told EdPublica she has observed the same patterns working with children in the Indian Sundarbans, where communities face recurrent flooding. In that setting, children were simply given colours and notebooks and asked to draw their fear — no explanation required. They could draw the sea, the floodwater, or the destruction they had witnessed, without needing the vocabulary to describe it. “The entire page might be black,” Ghosh says. “That could reflect the state of their mind.”
Ghosh also points out that the damage does not stop with the child. When a disaster disrupts a parent’s livelihood, access to healthcare and the ability to seek care for a child both suffer. Children can simultaneously lose access to school-based nutrition, health and hygiene programmes when education itself is disrupted — and they lose something harder to name. “Their school, friends, teachers and other people in their village form an important part of their social world,” she says. When that world is disrupted, recovery requires far more than reopening a classroom door.
Two Other Disasters, Two Other Answers
Wayanad is not the first place to confront this problem, and the responses elsewhere are instructive — both for what worked and for what the Vellarmala teachers had to invent on their own because it did not yet exist as institutional practice.
After Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) devastated the central Philippines in November 2013 — one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, affecting some 16 million people — the country’s Department of Education partnered with UNESCO and the Psychological Association of the Philippines to produce a formal teachers’ manual on psychosocial intervention for disaster-affected students.
The underlying premise mirrors exactly what Unnikrishnan and his colleagues discovered through trial and error: that teachers, positioned closest to children day after day, are often better placed than outside specialists to help a child begin processing trauma. In the immediate aftermath, volunteers in Cebu were running storytelling and “bibliotherapy” sessions with children in evacuation centres even before the typhoon made landfall — art and story as a first response, not an afterthought, much as the clown routine became at Vellarmala.
Nepal’s 2015 earthquake response took a more structural approach to a problem the Wayanad school solved through personal goodwill. Finn Church Aid and its Nepali partner CMC-Nepal built a peer-support network for teachers across 61 schools, training “psychosocial focal teachers” who could escalate serious cases to specialists in Kathmandu.
A needs assessment following the earthquake found more than 60 percent of affected children suffering sleep problems, alongside bullying, anxiousness and bedwetting — a set of symptoms that closely tracks what Bhaskaran describes seeing in Wayanad. What Nepal built was, in effect, an institutionalised version of what Vellarmala improvised: a formal mechanism for identifying which children need more than a routine and a smile, and where to send them.
The comparison is worth sitting with honestly rather than folding into the uplift: the expert network the Vellarmala teachers built by calling in personal favours was remarkable, but it was also contingent — a product of one community’s specific relationships and one headmaster’s persistence. Nepal’s model suggests what it might look like scaled and made durable rather than dependent on individual goodwill.
The Losses That Cannot Be Counted
There is a reason the language around this issue keeps reaching for something beyond the vocabulary of disaster economics. A damage assessment can price a destroyed school building, a washed-out road, a flattened home. It is far harder to price a child’s lost friendship, a familiar playground, or the emotional security that came from an intact community.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a formal category for this: non-economic loss and damage (NELD) — harm that resists financial quantification, spanning loss of life and health to the erosion of territory, cultural heritage, and social and cultural identity.
For children, these losses are acutely personal. Harjeet Singh, climate activist and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, told EdPublica that the destruction of a school should never be filed simply under lost infrastructure. “For children, a school is a sanctuary, a site of identity, and an ecosystem of emotional safety,” he says. What a disaster like Wayanad’s takes, in his framing, includes shattered social bonds and the sudden disappearance of the developmental environment a child grew up inside — which is why, he argues, recovery cannot stop at concrete and steel. “Recovery cannot just be about pouring concrete,” Singh says. “It must be about restoring the social fabric.”
This is no longer only a conceptual argument. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, operational under the UNFCCC since 2022 and hosted in the Philippines with the World Bank as its interim trustee, holds close to $488 million, with a first round of disbursements — roughly $250 million — scheduled to begin rolling out in 2025 and 2026. Mental health and psychosocial support is explicitly listed among the categories countries can submit project proposals for, alongside cultural heritage preservation and dignified relocation.
In principle, this means the kind of psychosocial infrastructure Nepal built with international NGO funding after 2015 — and the kind Vellarmala’s teachers had to invent themselves in 2024 — now has a formal funding channel it could be built through, if Kerala or the Government of India chose to apply.
What India’s Own Guidelines Say
India is not without a policy framework for exactly this problem — which makes the Vellarmala story more pointed, not less. The National Disaster Management Authority, working with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ Rahbar programme, updated its National Disaster Management Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services in Disasters in 2023, setting out a trauma-informed, whole-of-society approach meant to be built into every stage of the disaster management cycle, not bolted on afterward.
Alongside it sits the older National School Safety Policy Guidelines of 2016, which task School Management Committees and a designated “Safety Focal Point Teacher” in each school with disaster preparedness — including, on paper, psychosocial elements, though the bulk of that programme’s implementation history runs toward physical safety: building codes, mock drills, evacuation plans.
Two things are worth sitting with here. First, the guidelines exist — India is not starting from zero the way some of its neighbours were in 2015. Second, none of what the guidelines describe appears to have reached Vellarmala in July 2024. What the teachers built — the interest-mapping, the expert network, the sustained follow-through into exam season — was invented on the ground, by people with no formal psychosocial training, drawing on personal contacts rather than a state or district implementation plan.
That gap between the guideline and the ground is, in its own way, the story: India has written down roughly what Nepal built through international NGO funding, but writing it down and delivering it to a village school in Meppadi panchayat during the actual emergency turned out to be two very different things.
What This Adds Up To
Set side by side, Wayanad, Tacloban and the villages of rural Nepal point toward the same conclusion from three different directions: formal mental health infrastructure for children after a climate disaster is, almost everywhere, arriving late, underfunded, or not at all — and the gap is being filled, when it is filled, by whoever is standing closest to the child. Sometimes that is a trained peer-support teacher network built with international funding. Sometimes it is two teachers in clown costumes who happened to believe art might help.
Both approaches worked, to a point. But only one of them is replicable on demand, in a district that doesn’t happen to have a headmaster with the right personal contacts. That is the uncomfortable finding underneath the uplifting parts of this story: what saved Vellarmala’s children was extraordinary improvisation under pressure, not policy — and extraordinary improvisation is, by definition, not something the next disaster-hit school can count on.
Rebuilding a Childhood
Chooralmala’s teachers never had the power to restore everything the landslide took. They could not bring back the children who died. They could not recreate the old school, or return the community to what it was before July 30, 2024.
What they did was give children back a routine when their lives had been upended. They found each child’s individual talent when grief had become the only story anyone was telling about them. They brought artists, scientists and experts into children’s lives who would otherwise never have crossed paths with a village school in Wayanad. They encouraged children to dance, sing, perform, experiment and compete — and when children struggled, as the SSLC refusals showed they still would, the teachers stayed rather than declaring the recovery finished.
What Chooralmala’s teachers proved is not that children are resilient. That word is used too easily after disasters, as though recovery is something that simply happens with time. It isn’t. Resilience had to be built—patiently, deliberately, by teachers who chose to replace silence with music, grief with art, isolation with friendship, and fear with purpose.
The tragedy is that none of this should have depended on extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. By the time the next flood, landslide or cyclone tears through another school, children should not have to wait for a headmaster with the right contacts or two teachers willing to arrive dressed as clowns. They should find a system that already knows how to help them heal.
Climate change is making disasters more frequent, putting schools in the path of floods, landslides and storms. When classrooms disappear, books are lost and playgrounds are buried, rebuilding the school is only the beginning. The harder task is helping children rebuild the sense of safety, routine and childhood that the disaster took from them.
EP Deep Dive: Data & Solutions
After a Scorching Summer, Delhi’s Children Are Slow to Return Outdoors
Extreme heat and children are the focus of this EdPublica report. Parents in Delhi and Noida explain how rising temperatures, air pollution and changing routines are keeping children indoors.
After months of extreme heat, Delhi’s children face another challenge: returning outdoors. Heat, air pollution and changing routines are reshaping how children play. EdPublica spoke to parents in Delhi to understand how extreme heat has changed their children’s play habits and what it might take to bring them back outdoors.
New Delhi: Mohini Bisht is a first-time mother. Her two-year-old son, Shomu (name changed), has just begun to string together his first words. Among the first he learned is “AC” (air conditioner). Living in the National Capital Territory, the family faces daytime temperatures that regularly reach between 42 and 45 degrees Celsius.
“Mummy, garmi lag rahi hai, AC chala do” (“Mummy, it’s hot, turn on the AC”), her son now says. He has learned to turn the AC on and off by himself. On especially humid days, he gets up and flicks the switch on his own.
In April, Delhi saw a maximum of 42.8 degrees Celsius, the hottest for that month in four years. In May, nighttime heat also broke records, with the minimum temperature hitting 32.4 degrees Celsius, the warmest May night in nearly 14 years, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
In June, the heat index, or ‘feels-like’ temperature, soared to 51.3 degrees Celsius, the highest of the year. The heat index combines air temperature and relative humidity to show how hot it actually feels, not just what the thermometer shows.
“The whole day you’re just waiting for evening so you can go out,” Bisht said. As temperatures rose, she stopped taking her son out to play. “If the child gets dehydrated or faces issues, it becomes a big problem,” she said. Her parents and in-laws also advised her not to take him outside.
Her caution has a basis. India’s exposure is higher than the global average. Worldwide, up to 560 million children aged 0 to 9, or 43 per cent, live through at least one additional month of heat stress a year because of climate change. In India the share is 61 per cent. For five or more months of total heat stress, the Indian share is 50 per cent, against 27 per cent globally. South Asia is one of the regions with the most children exposed: about 167 million children, or 62 per cent, face an additional month, and in Bangladesh the share is 79 per cent.
Extreme Heat and Children: The Challenge of Outdoor Play
Nearly 145 million Indian children aged up to nine, or 61 per cent of that age group, live through at least one additional month of dangerous heat stress each year because of human-induced climate change, according to a study published in August in Science Advances by researchers led by Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The study estimates that climate change has doubled the number of Indian children facing five or more months of dangerous heat a year, from 59 million to 118 million. The authors note that children are especially vulnerable because their bodies heat up faster than adults’ and regulate temperature less efficiently.
Even as early October brings daytime highs in Delhi that linger in the mid-30s, according to IMD forecasts, summer is retreating from most of north India, bringing the season’s first pleasant evenings. For many families, this raises the question: after months indoors due to oppressive heat, will children return outside?
The challenges don’t end with summer. “Apart from the heat, there is also poor air quality,” said Dr Himani Narula, a development paediatrician in New Delhi. Seasonal illnesses, too, play a role: “Sometimes there is a dengue season and other times there is a flu season.” Parents worry their children will pick up infections, making it hard to let them outside for long. “For all these reasons, children are ultimately at home, even when the weather improves,” she said.
The air is a genuine constraint, not just a parental worry. A 2021 study in Environmental Science and Pollution Research reported an almost 30 per cent rise in daily emergency visits for acute respiratory symptoms among Delhi’s children on high-pollution days. Last winter, the Delhi government suspended outdoor school activities in November and December after the Supreme Court warned against holding outdoor sports in hazardous air.
EdPublica spoke to seven parents from middle-class households in Noida-Delhi, all of whom said they have reorganised their days around the heat, moving their children’s playtime from evening to night to escape gruelling temperatures and humidity. They are not a representative sample, and EdPublica did not measure how much time children actually spend outdoors.
“Dinner is cooked first, then comes the outing, then a late meal and bed. The schedule has changed because of the heat,” said Sunita Kumar, a home tutor and mother of three, including a six-year-old.
Kumar, who lives in Mayur Vihar, New Delhi, worries the routine is changing children’s relationship with the outdoors. “Kids nowadays aren’t seeing the sun,” she said. “They go to school in the morning, stay inside all day, then go home. Even a one-hour tuition is indoors.” This habit, she fears, may outlast the weather. “Kids have built a habit without realising,” she said.
“Kids nowadays aren’t seeing the sun”
The pattern has research behind it. In a 2023 study in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers fitted preschoolers at a university childcare centre in Texas with activity monitors for a week. On hotter days, the children spent more of their outdoor play sedentary, about 70 per cent of it at 35 degrees Celsius against 62 per cent at 22 degrees, and less in moderate-to-vigorous activity, 21 per cent against 27 per cent. The sample was small and the temperatures were milder than Delhi’s summer, but the direction is clear. A 2022 review of more than 150 studies in the journal Temperature also warned that parents’ perception that it is “too hot to play” can further restrict children’s activity.
Moving play to cooler hours is, in fact, what heat-safety guidance advises, alongside hydration and shaded, green outdoor spaces. In that sense, the parents’ adaptation is sensible. The concern is what happens once the heat passes.
The human body and brain tend to acclimatise to repeated exposure of any kind, Dr Narula explained. Keeping children in air-conditioned rooms and away from natural weather, she said, can get their bodies used to the indoor environment and blunt their heat tolerance.
Direct evidence in children is scarce. A small study in Indoor Air compared 20 adults used to air-conditioned and naturally ventilated environments in a climate chamber, measuring skin temperature, sweat rate and thermal comfort. It concluded that long-term exposure to stable air-conditioned environments may weaken thermal adaptability. The study involved adults, not children, and does not show that air conditioning harms a child’s heat tolerance, but it makes Dr Narula’s concern plausible.
But temperature isn’t the only factor shaping how children respond to heat. Bisht notes that her son complains about the heat when alone with her, but behaves differently around friends. “If I bring him with friends or cousins, he plays on the balcony in the sun and enjoys it,” she says. “But if he’s alone with me, he voices his opinions.”
“Children’s tolerance for discomfort changes when other kids are around,” Dr Narula explained. “What the kid is saying is I will accept the discomfort of heat if it means I am enjoying time with peers.” The brain is adapting to these climatic challenges, and according to her, the child needs to get used to this conditioning.
Research on friendship and physical activity points the same way. A 2013 systematised review of friendship networks in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that higher activity among friends is associated with higher activity in the individual, and longitudinal studies showed children’s activity shifting to match their friends’. Much of this work is observational, and it is hard to separate influence from children simply choosing similar friends. Still, it hints at what could bring children back outdoors: the company of other children. Parents often tell Dr Narula their kids stay home because there are few other children for them to play with.
Schools, where children already gather, are the obvious place to start, Dr Narula said. Before lessons begin, when the morning heat is lower, children could spend time in the open air, she said: sports, a prayer assembly, physical training, “any kind of activity which children can do with each other in a good setting.”
From toddlerhood through the teenage years, “children look for peers,” something that motivates them far more than being around parents, Dr Narula explained. The outdoors, she said, offers something indoor play cannot, and sunlight helps raise dopamine levels and, with them, mood.
The best-documented benefit of outdoor time in children is for eyesight. A 2024 meta-analysis in Ophthalmic Research found that children and adolescents with the most time outdoors had roughly half the risk of developing myopia of those with the least, and that risk fell as outdoor hours rose: going from 3.5 to 7 hours a week was linked with a 20 per cent lower risk. The leading explanation is that bright outdoor light prompts the retina to release dopamine, which slows the eye’s growth, though the mechanism is not fully settled. Outdoor time did not slow the progression of myopia in children who already had it.
The cooler weeks may be a short window. Whether children use it will depend less on the thermometer than on whether there is anyone outside to play with, and on how long the air stays clear enough to let them.
This article is written as part of the Media Fellowship under the Cities on Fire Initiative in Bangkok, Colombo, Jakarta and Manila and ‘Cooler Cities. Healthier Children. Brighter Futures.’ Initiative in New Delhi.
EP Deep Dive: Data & Solutions
Climate Change, Overfishing and the Uncertain Future of Bangladesh’s Hilsa Fishermen
EDPUBLICA GROUND REPORT: Climate change, overfishing and pollution are putting Bangladesh’s Hilsa fishery under pressure, threatening catches and fishermen’s livelihoods.
An EdPublica ground report from Bangladesh examines why the Hilsa catch has fallen after nearly two decades of growth, and what climate change and human pressures mean for the fishermen who depend on the fish.
DHALCHAR, Bhola, Bangladesh–At the fish landing centre, boats still come in one after another, and the crowd of fishermen on the shore grows with each arrival. But Ruhul Amin has stopped counting on what they carry.
“I can no longer support my family by catching Hilsa. I have been carrying the burden of debt for years. I wait for the Hilsa season every year with high hopes, but time and again, those hopes are dashed. There is no sign of Hilsa this year either, so I have to return home facing a loss.”
Ruhul Amin, 45, spoke these words amid the clamour of the fish landing centre on Dhalchar Island, situated along the banks of the Meghna River, one of the three principal rivers that form the vast Ganges Delta. Several other fishermen echoed his sentiments.
Dhalchar Island, located in the Meghna estuary, lies 100 kilometres from the Bhola district headquarters and 347 kilometres from the capital, Dhaka. Waves from the Meghna River crash against the island’s fish landing centre. The morning sun has just risen. Seagulls fly in flocks alongside the river waves. Boats dock one after another at the landing centre, and the crowd of fishermen grows. Yet, most of the boats arriving at the dock carry no Hilsa.
The area is bustling with activity—tea stalls, eateries, boat repair shops, and other establishments are crowded. However, there is a scarcity of the very fish—Hilsa—around which this landing centre was built. The fragile Dhalchar landing centre is shrinking due to river erosion, yet it remains a lifeline for the fishermen. Dhalchar Island remains quiet for most of the year but comes alive during the Hilsa season. Every year, thousands of fishermen gather here, filled with hope. It is not just Dhalchar Island; numerous fish landing centres along the coast of Bangladesh inspire similar hope among fishermen. About one million fishermen earn their livelihoods by catching Hilsa at these centres. Yet, they can no longer rely on Hilsa for their sustenance.
Ruhul Amin is one of those million fishermen. Amidst this despair and financial loss, the four-month-long Hilsa season is set to conclude on 7 October. The government has banned the catching, storing, transporting, and marketing of Hilsa for 22 days—from 8 October to 29 October—during the fish’s breeding season. Fishermen will once again have to wait until the following year for the Hilsa season.
“Fishing no longer sustains a livelihood”
Amidst the bustle and noise of the Dhalchar fish landing centre, Ruhul Amin voiced his frustration: “Every year, I’m forced to take out loans to go fishing with my boat and nets. I cast my nets during the Hilsa season with high hopes, but the catch is so meagre that it doesn’t even cover the operating costs. How am I supposed to repay the loans? How will I support my family? I may have to abandon this ancestral fishing profession; I can no longer bear the burden of debt.”
Bangladesh’s Hilsa Catch Is Falling After Two Decades of Growth
Even as the Hilsa season draws to a close, Ruhul Amin and many other fishermen have failed to recover their fishing expenses; they are ending the season at a loss. After nearly two decades of steady growth in Hilsa production in Bangladesh, the catch has fallen in each of the past three years. Simultaneously, the average weight of the fish is decreasing—a trend that has raised concerns among researchers.
“Same nets, same boats, same rivers. Yet, the spots where we used to catch Hilsa in the past no longer yield any fish,” said Abdur Rob and several other fishermen from Kuakata on the Bangladeshi coast. They explained that as times change, they are encountering new crises while fishing at sea. Fishermen across most coastal districts—including Barguna, Patuakhali, Bhola, Bagerhat, and Lakshmipur—are grappling with professional crises. Climate change has impacted their lives and livelihoods, while natural disasters create obstacles to their fishing activities. Another group of fishermen believes that, beyond natural disasters, government-imposed seasonal fishing bans and various human-induced factors are hindering their profession.
According to records from the Bangladesh Department of Fisheries, the volume of Hilsa catch in Bangladesh began to rise in the 2016–17 fiscal year. That year, 496,000 tonnes of Hilsa were harvested within Bangladesh’s waters. In the 2017–18 fiscal year, the catch rose to 517,000 tonnes. The upward trend continued steadily until the 2022–23 fiscal year, when the harvest reached 571,000 tonnes. However, in the following year—2023–24—the catch volume suddenly dropped to 529,000 tonnes. It declined further to 500,000 tonnes in the 2024–25 fiscal year. Sources indicate that the Hilsa catch during July and August of the current year has fallen by 30–40% compared to the previous year.
According to data from WorldFish and the Department of Fisheries, Bangladesh accounts for roughly 70–86% of the world’s Hilsa catch. India lands about 10–15%, mainly in West Bengal, Odisha, and Gujarat, and Myanmar about 3–10%. The remainder is caught in the coastal rivers and seas of Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Since 2019, Bangladesh has exported Hilsa to India, particularly during Durga Puja and other occasions; this practice continued until last year. However, this year, the situation reversed, with India exporting Hilsa to Bangladesh.
Climate change has created crises in various marine sectors, including the Hilsa fishery. As catch volumes decline, fishermen are facing new challenges. Scientists fear that marine risks will escalate in the future. A study titled “Climate Change as Observed in the Bay of Bengal” highlights the dangers posed to the marine environment by climate change. Another study by the World Bank also addresses the impact of climate change on fishermen at sea.
Hilsa Is Losing Its Favourable Habitat
Fishermen observe that coastal temperatures, rainfall patterns, and the nature of the monsoon season have all shifted. The timing of freshwater influx into rivers and coastal salinity levels are changing, as are marine environmental conditions. Collectively, these changes influence the migration and breeding cycles of the Hilsa fish. A specific combination of factors—including water temperature, salinity, currents, tides, water density, oxygen levels, and rainfall—is required to create the right conditions for Hilsa migration and spawning. However, the environment essential for the Hilsa has been significantly degraded.
Hilsa experts largely concur with these observations made by fishermen. Anisur Rahman, former Director of the Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute (BFRI), states, “Hilsa require specific water currents and depths to migrate into inland waters. They need a water depth of at least 10 metres to navigate the rivers, but they are not finding it.”
In some areas, river depth has dropped to just 18–20 feet (about 5.5–6 metres)—far below the 75–80 feet (about 23–24 metres) required for Hilsa breeding. Furthermore, submerged shoals and sandbars have obstructed waterways between Chandpur and Monpura, leaving only narrow channels for navigation. Hilsa migrate from the sea to inland waters by swimming against the current; however, reduced river navigability and diminished water flow are hindering this migration. Hilsa from the Padma River are renowned for their superior taste, yet the fish are no longer entering the Padma in significant numbers.
Hilsa production in Bangladesh—which had been steadily rising for two decades—is now declining. This has raised concerns regarding the survival of this popular fish and its affordability for ordinary people. Anisur Rahman has been conducting research on Hilsa for a long time. Expressing concern over the decline in Hilsa catches, he said, “I’m truly worried about the population or stock of Hilsa.”
“The fish’s food chain is being disrupted by falling water levels, rising temperatures, and changes in water quality. This balance is further destabilized by excessive heat and altered rainfall patterns caused by climate change,” added Anisur Rahman.
Dr Md Sajedul Haque, a professor in the Department of Fisheries Technology at Patuakhali Science and Technology University (PSTU), observed, “Hilsa catches used to be higher; now they are lower. This is a global problem. It is happening due to global warming.”
“If Hilsa does not find a suitable environment, it will neither stay there nor spawn. Factors such as water salinity, the availability of plankton for food, and water temperature are crucial for Hilsa. If salinity is too high, they will not spawn, or the eggs will fail to hatch and perish. Without food, they will not grow. If the temperature is not optimal, the eggs will not be fertilized, and the fry will not hatch. The Hilsa’s life cycle is directly linked to these factors,” added Sajedul Haque.
To a fisherman, climate change is not a PowerPoint presentation; it is a harsh reality and a matter of life and death.
Human-Induced Factors
Alongside climate change, human-induced factors are jeopardising the breeding of Hilsa fish. Local fishermen, trawler owners, and wholesalers engage in unregulated and illegal fishing practices. The number of illegal trawlers in the sea has multiplied significantly. Trawlers are essentially large wooden boats powered by high-capacity engines. They operate by dragging illegal ‘Behundi’ nets (bag nets) through the sea for hours using this engine power. These nets catch not only large fish but also small fish fry and juvenile Hilsa (Jatka), thereby destroying the primary breeding grounds of Hilsa and other marine species.
Three power plants are located within Hilsa sanctuaries along the Bangladeshi coast—the Payra Power Plant, the Patuakhali Power Plant on the banks of the Ramnabad Channel, and the Barishal Power Plant at Taltali on the banks of the Bishkhali River. Many have expressed concern regarding the pollution caused by these facilities. These coal-fired power plants discharge waste and heated water into the rivers. A decline in Hilsa populations has been observed since the establishment of these plants. Fishermen are no longer catching Hilsa in the Ramnabad River (Patuakhali district) and the Payra River (Barguna district) as they used to; consequently, many are turning to other professions.
Fishermen Face Growing Risks at Sea
Fishermen report that while Hilsa exists in the deep sea, the fish are not migrating to shallower waters, as the environment there is no longer suitable for their survival. Small-scale fishermen face a dire crisis because the Hilsa do not venture into shallow waters, and many have already abandoned the trade. Those who remain in the profession are forced to venture into the deep sea to catch Hilsa, where they face increasing risks.
Every year, many fishermen go missing due to various natural hazards. The sea is becoming more turbulent than in the past, and the level of danger is rising. Nuruddin, a fisherman from Char Fasson in Bhola district, says, “I have been going out to sea to fish since childhood. I used to have no fear, but now venturing out to sea is frightening for us. I cannot say for certain if it is due to climate change, but the waves are rougher than before. We often face accidents because we do not receive weather warnings in time. I have personally been involved in accidents a few times; fortunately, I survived and returned.”
A study titled “Resilient Bangladesh: Fishermen Cope with Rough Seas” notes that for centuries, the fishermen’s traditional boats were sturdy enough to withstand conditions in the Bay of Bengal. That is no longer the case. Fishermen are increasingly facing more powerful storms and turbulent seas. Every time they head out to fish, they are essentially gambling with their lives.
Even as the risks for fishermen rise, fish stocks in the sea are declining, impacting their livelihoods. Despite this crisis, fishermen continue to struggle for survival. Research titled “Dwindling Coastal Fisheries Biodiversity of Bangladesh: The Causes and Effects” indicates that coastal fish stocks are being overexploited, leading to a depletion of many species. The marine sector’s contribution to the country’s fisheries is shrinking annually. According to assessments by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), approximately 28% of coastal fish species now fall under the IUCN Red List of threatened species.
Golam Mostafa Chowdhury, President of the Barguna District Trawler Owners’ Association, states, “In most cases, fishermen go missing when their trawlers capsize. The sea has become rougher than before, and weather conditions have deteriorated. Siltation has occurred in many areas, and many fishermen fail to receive proper weather warnings. These factors are contributing to a rise in the number of missing fishermen. Rescue vessels need to be stationed in areas with high concentrations of fishermen, and arrangements must be made for the rehabilitation of those who go missing.”
Initiatives to Protect Hilsa
The government is taking various measures to protect the Hilsa fish. Conservation and management activities for Hilsa in Bangladesh are conducted under the Protection and Conservation of Fish Act, 1985. A programme to protect Jatka (juvenile Hilsa) was launched in Bangladesh in 2003–04, leading to a gradual increase in Hilsa production. The Jatka conservation drive runs for two months—March and April—during which fishing of all kinds, including Hilsa, is prohibited in designated sanctuaries across the country. Additionally, fishing for all species, including Hilsa, is banned in marine waters for 58 days, from 15 April to 11 June. Initially, in 2008, the ban on catching mother Hilsa (Ma Hilsh) was set for 11 days, but from the following year onwards, this period was extended to 22 days. A ban on catching mother Hilsa is in effect from 8 October to 29 October this year. For two decades, the trend of Hilsa harvesting had been on the rise; however, research is currently underway to understand why the catch rate has recently begun to decline.
Ruhul Amin, a fisherman, is spending the final days of the Hilsa season at the Dhalchar fish landing centre. He might venture out to sea a few more times with other fishermen to catch Hilsa. Yet, amidst the crowds and grueling labor, a question weighs on his mind: will he be able to take home enough earnings to support his family for the coming months? Ruhul Amin does not know the answer—nor do many other fishermen.
For the fishermen of Bangladesh, the Hilsa season is drawing to a close amidst a period of uncertainty. The voices of the crowd at the fish landing centre fade into the air, carrying with them the indistinct sounds of the fishermen’s suffering.
EP Deep Dive: Data & Solutions
India Has Robots. So Why Does Manual Scavenging Still Put Workers in Sewers?
India has recorded at least 662 sewer and septic-tank deaths in 10 years, despite a legal ban on hazardous sanitation work and growing use of robotic cleaning. EdPublica examines why manual scavenging persists—and what it will take to end dangerous human entry into sewers.
Around 10 pm on 30 September 2025, a worker went down into the septic tank of a hotel in Kattappana, in Kerala’s Idukki district, to clean it. He became trapped. Two colleagues went in to pull him out and were trapped too.
The manhole was too small for rescuers to enter. The fire force brought in an earthmover to break open part of the structure, and after a rescue operation of about an hour and a half the three men were taken to hospital, where they could not be saved. They were Jayaraman, from Cumbum in Tamil Nadu’s Theni district, and Sundara Pandian, 36, and Michael, 23, both from Gudalur in the Nilgiris. The Idukki District Collector’s report later attributed the deaths to inhalation of toxic gas in a tank with critically low oxygen, though the gas itself was not identified. It recommended a multi-department inquiry and compensation for their families of the dead involved in manual scavenging.
Kerala is the state where this is least expected. In the dataset used for this report, it recorded three sewer deaths in the decade to 2025: two in 2016, one in 2017, and none since. The men of Kattappana do not appear in that count. Nor does Joy, a sanitation worker who drowned in a waste-choked canal in Thiruvananthapuram in July 2024. Every figure in this story is a minimum.
Between 2016 and 2025, the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK) recorded 662 deaths across India in connection with hazardous sanitation work. India banned the employment of manual scavengers in 1993. The 2013 Act went further, barring anyone from being employed to clean sewers and septic tanks hazardously, that is, without the protective gear and safeguards its rules prescribe. Yet sanitation workers still enter through narrow openings, sometimes with only basic protective equipment, to clear blockages and clean spaces where sewage, toxic gases and human waste accumulate. The work can take hours; in the wrong conditions, it takes lives.
The toll peaked in 2019, at 124 deaths. Tamil Nadu recorded the most over the decade, at 93, followed by Maharashtra (84), Gujarat (83), Uttar Pradesh (81) and Haryana (69); Delhi recorded 65. The five states named accounted for about 62 per cent of the deaths. Since the NCSK began counting in 1993, it has logged 1,361 such deaths, 264 of them in Tamil Nadu and 13 in Kerala.
Official series differ by source and date, because states report late. Replies in Parliament have put the toll for 2019 anywhere between 116 and 133, and a reply in March 2026 that counted from 2017 onwards ranked Uttar Pradesh first (86), ahead of Maharashtra (82) and Tamil Nadu (77). The pattern is consistent even if the totals are not.
A note on terms also matters here. The government draws a legal line between “manual scavenging”, which the 2013 Act defines as lifting human excreta from insanitary latrines, and the “hazardous cleaning” of sewers and septic tanks. It has told Parliament that no deaths have been reported from the first, while counting those in the second. Campaigners treat both as the same caste-bound labour. This report uses “manual scavenging” for the wider practice and “sewer deaths” for the deaths.
Behind the toll lies a harder question: if India has achieved significant technological advancement, why does manual scavenging still persist at all? What keeps people entering spaces they should never have to enter?
For Bezwada Wilson, national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) and a Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, the fight against manual scavenging has always been about more than sewers. Through the SKA, he helped document the practice, challenge official claims and take the issue to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment recognised the continuing problem, ordered the identification and rehabilitation of workers, and directed compensation of ₹10 lakh to the families of those who died in sewers, bringing dignity, equality and caste discrimination to the centre of the debate.
The Work Begins Long Before the Sewer
Wilson grew up in a community that has been tied to sanitation work for generations, and he has spent much of his life challenging the system that kept it that way. As a child, he says, he studied in a separate school near his settlement, where caste and language shaped where children from his community were sent to learn. He came to the movement against manual scavenging through an understanding of what prolonged contact with human excreta does to a person’s health and life.
People who come into contact with human excreta, he says in an interview with EdPublica, are exposed to deadly diseases. Their quality of life deteriorates. That, for Wilson, was reason enough to act. But the deeper problem is what happens when a community is identified with one kind of work for generations. Even education does not necessarily erase that association.
Wilson says government programmes aimed at upskilling members of sanitation-worker communities exist, but questions whether they are reaching people effectively. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment told the Lok Sabha in 2022 that it had spent ₹266.16 crore on its self-employment scheme for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers since 2013-14; that scheme has since been replaced by NAMASTE. Students in these communities still face difficulties accessing education in many places.
Then there is discrimination. When people have been treated as inferior for generations, Wilson argues, a change in law does not automatically change the way society sees them. That matters because manual scavenging is not simply a story about a hazardous job. It is also a story about who is expected to do it.
The Number that Remains Visible
The 662 deaths recorded between 2016 and 2025 are a floor, not a full count. They are the deaths captured in the available dataset, and that distinction matters: the scale of the problem is larger than the deaths that make it into official or reported records. The NCSK says its figures draw on state governments’ reports, media reports and complaints it receives.
The gap between official and civil-society counts is wide. The Ministry told the Lok Sabha in August 2026 that 498 people died in hazardous sewer and septic-tank cleaning between January 2019 and June 2026, a toll that fell from 132 in 2019 to 47 in 2025. The SKA’s own tracking runs the other way, as the table shows. It has counted 113 deaths in the first seven months of 2026 alone; the government’s figure for the first four months is 52.
The two series cannot both be right, and the difference is not only about counting. It is also about classification, since the government counts hazardous cleaning but not “manual scavenging”. Even among the deaths that are recorded, accountability is slow: the NCSK says compensation has been paid in 1,206 of the 1,361 cases logged since 1993, with 101 still pending.
Vimal Govind M K, founder and CEO of Kerala-based Genrobotics, came to the problem from the technology side. His company turned its robotics towards sewer cleaning, he says, after the founders came across a newspaper photograph of a man who had died inside a sewer in Kozhikode, Kerala. The image changed the direction of their work.
“We decided to pivot the technology we were developing towards a completely different problem—to prevent people from entering sewers and doing this dangerous work manually,” Govind said.
That decision eventually produced Bandicoot, a robotic system designed to clean manholes without sending a person inside. Genrobotics says it was first deployed in Kerala in 2018. But the existence of a machine does not mean people stop entering sewers.
A Robot Exists. So Why are People Still Entering?
Genrobotics says it has trained more than 3,000 workers and has around 400 robots operating in India. Its public figures have varied: a March 2026 press release spoke of more than 275 deployments, while earlier interviews cited 300 and 350 robots. Govind says a task that can take three to four hours when done manually can be completed in around 20 minutes using the technology. Operating one robot takes two workers, he says.
Figures from the field point the same way. Chennai’s water board has been reported to have cleaned more than 5,000 manholes in the first year of deployment, and a company case study lists 1,111 manholes cleaned by two robots for Mumbai’s civic body between September 2024 and March 2025. Both figures come from the company or from secondary reports.
On paper, the logic seems straightforward: if a machine can enter a sewer, a human being should not have to. But India’s sanitation infrastructure does not operate on paper. Municipalities and water boards buy machines, yet many of the deadliest jobs are commissioned by someone else. Kattappana was a hotel’s tank. This week in Mumbai’s Santacruz East, Santosh Kashate, 50, died and Ajay Thakur, 30, was hospitalised after they allegedly entered a municipal sewer manhole while cleaning a housing society’s drain. Police were registering a case of death by negligence against the contractor, and said society members could also be booked for hiring private workers without informing the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.
Some facilities need specialised cleaning only occasionally. Private establishments have little reason to invest in technology for a task they might need once a year, or once in several years. Govind points to another problem: safety enforcement.
In India, confined-space management and workplace safety remain uneven, he says. In countries such as Singapore and the UAE, workers require safety training and permits before undertaking such work, with safety procedures built into the job itself. India’s problem is therefore not simply a shortage of machines. It is also a shortage of systems that make entering the sewer unacceptable.
The courts have pushed in that direction. In October 2023, in Dr Balram Singh v Union of India, the Supreme Court raised compensation for sewer deaths from ₹10 lakh to ₹30 lakh. In January 2025 it barred manual sewer cleaning in six metropolitan cities, and in July 2026 it issued show-cause notices on contempt to the chief secretaries of five states. After two contract workers died in a Tiruchirappalli manhole on 22 September 2025, the corporation announced ₹30 lakh for each family and filed a complaint against the contractor. Compensation and complaints now follow such deaths. Prevention still lags.
When Protective Equipment is not Enough
For years, the response to hazardous sanitation work has often included protective equipment—masks, gloves and other safety gear. But Govind says equipment alone does not necessarily change behaviour. He says workers who have spent years entering sewers can become accustomed to the practice, and that even after being provided with protective equipment, some continue to enter because that is how the work has traditionally been done.
Official figures show the limits of the equipment route. Under the government’s NAMASTE scheme, 89,915 sewer and septic-tank workers had been validated by August 2026, and about 87,000 protective kits had been distributed by the scheme’s third anniversary in July. The Lok Sabha was also told that 52 people died in hazardous cleaning in the first four months of 2026. The figures do not say who the dead were or whether they had been profiled. They do show that distributing equipment has not, by itself, ended the deaths.
Changing that, Govind says, requires training and a cultural shift. That observation brings the technology debate back to Wilson’s argument. If caste has historically determined who performs sanitation work, and if generations of workers have been conditioned to see hazardous cleaning as part of their occupation, then a robot can solve only one part of the problem. It can keep a person out of the sewer. It cannot, by itself, determine what happens to that person afterwards.
What Happens to the Worker When the Robot Arrives?
This may be the most important question in the mechanisation debate. Automation is often discussed in terms of machines replacing people. In sanitation, however, the better outcome is different: workers moving from hazardous manual entry to safer, skilled roles.
Genrobotics says sanitation workers are trained to operate its technology and become part of its teams. The company said in January 2025 that more than 1,000 of the workers it had trained had become robot operators. It says the transition removes direct interaction with sewage from their work. A worker who once entered a manhole could instead operate a machine from outside it.
The job remains. The danger does not have to. Those numbers are the company’s own, though. What would settle the question is what operators earn, who employs them and whether the jobs last. The model also depends on municipalities and other employers actually investing in mechanisation, training workers and enforcing the rules.
Govind says budget allocation remains one of the major barriers to adoption. Government programmes and funds can support mechanisation, but ultimately policymakers and local administrators have to decide to spend the money. The government’s main programme is NAMASTE, launched in July 2023 with an outlay of ₹349.73 crore over three years to 2025-26 across more than 4,800 urban local bodies. It profiles sewer and septic-tank workers, provides protective kits and health insurance, and offers capital subsidies of up to 50 per cent for sanitation machines and enterprises. An extension to rural areas, with an additional outlay of about ₹498.73 crore for 2026-27 to 2030-31, has been reported.
The Geography Tells Another Story
The deaths are not evenly distributed across India. Kerala, by comparison, recorded three deaths in the dataset, two in 2016 and one in 2017, with none from 2018 to 2025.
That contrast is worth examining, but not celebrating too quickly. A decline in reported deaths does not, by itself, prove that hazardous sanitation work has disappeared. Differences in reporting, infrastructure, enforcement and the kinds of sanitation work carried out in each state can all affect the numbers. Kattappana and Joy’s death in Thiruvananthapuram sit outside Kerala’s count.
Govind says Kerala has stronger safety practices than many other states, while acknowledging that enforcement and investment remain challenges nationally. Genrobotics first deployed Bandicoot in Kerala in 2018, the year the zero run begins. The timing is suggestive, not proof, and Kattappana shows what a municipal robot does not reach: a private tank behind a hotel.
The more useful question, then, is not simply which state has the fewest deaths. It is what is different about the systems that keep workers out of hazardous spaces.
Besides the Number 662
India’s response has increasingly moved towards mechanisation. The government has also introduced programmes aimed at eliminating hazardous sanitation work, rehabilitating workers and creating safer sanitation systems.
The experiences of Wilson and Govind point to two requirements for the same goal. One is technological: make it possible to clean a sewer without sending a person inside. The other is social: make sure the person who no longer enters the sewer has the education, income, skills and social acceptance to move into safer work. Neither can replace the other. A third, the law, is meant to hold them together.
A robot can pull a worker away from toxic sewage. A law can prohibit an employer from sending that worker back in. A rehabilitation programme can offer another livelihood. But unless all three work together, the prohibition remains vulnerable to the same pressures that created the occupation in the first place.
Govind predicts that the sanitation industry could become almost completely automated within the next five to six years, with very little human involvement in hazardous work. It is an ambitious prediction. Against more than 4,800 urban local bodies, the company’s own count is a few hundred robots.
The technology may arrive before the social transformation does. And that is the real test for India. Not whether it can build a robot capable of entering a sewer. But whether it can build a system in which no human being has to.
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