Performative Social Justice: Legitimized Exploitation under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013

The inhumane practice of manual scavenging was legally banned in India with the introduction of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. However, despite having an entire legal framework designed to ban this practice, it is still very prevalent across the country. This highlights the structural limitations and inefficiencies of the PEMSR Act, 2013 which are often exploited. This article analyses the structural limitations of the PEMSR Act through a socio-legal lens. It uses Anand Teltumbde’s arguments on the revalidation of caste and the social exclusion theory as a sociological lens to explore the shortcomings of the Act in addressing the social and political spheres of the practice. It evaluates the systemic deficiencies of the Act including – definitional ambiguities, informal contracting, and failures in rehabilitation. It lays emphasis on the exclusion of the social realities faced by manual scavengers as a result of caste-based discrimination and argues that the Act fails in achieving its own objectives, thus creating a pretence of social justice.