The World’s Worst Job?

Rakesh sits in a low crouch at the bottom of a seven-foot-deep manhole, sloshing away in a swirl of human waste and sediment. Equipped with a hoe and a steel bar, and wearing only a pair of loose purple underpants, Rakesh (who uses only one name) empties the thick black sludge from a clogged sewer into a bucket that his fellow crew members hoist up and dump in the middle of a narrow road.

A small mountain of decaying excrement accumulates between the manhole and a rickety wooden vegetable cart. Two co-workers reach down and yank Rakesh out by his sore, extended arms, his body splattered with putrid muck. At 27, with a wife, three young daughters and a monthly income of about $100, he has been a sewage worker for the Delhi Jal (Water) Board for the past 10 years.

Rakesh stumbles out into the midday light, too dazed to speak. "The first thing you notice is the unbearable smell," explains his co-worker Rajender Kumar. "Next are the cockroaches, and then the rats—big rats." He complains of skin rashes and eye soreness, respiratory and liver problems.

By birth, Rajender, Rakesh and their colleagues are members of the Valmiki community, the bottom wrung of the social hierarchy in India, which dates back thousands of years, a subcategory of "untouchable" Dalits. Because of discrimination and lack of opportunities, they work one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the subcontinent, if not the world.

Their homes are both down the road and centuries removed from India's gleaming technology parks and buoyantly youthful call centers. Some 800 million Indians scrape by on less than $2 a day.

New Delhi was not built to accommodate its current population of about 16 million. With hundreds of thousands pouring in from rural areas annually, its sewers—about 3,700 miles of them—are a mess, and the workers tasked with keeping the waste flowing unobstructed (half of it empties into the nearby Yamuna River) regularly put their lives on the line. "The whole system is going to collapse in the next two years if it continues as it is now," says Mahendra Kumar, a junior engineer for Delhi Jal.