Of Legal Mobilisation and Active Citizenship: Examining NGO Litigation in India to Eradicate Manual Scavenging

Sammanfattning: For decades, manual scavengers – people cleaning and engaging with human faeces as part of the sanitation chain, most of whom are Dalits – in India have been protesting against the severe health risks and exploitation associated with their work. Despite the enactment of stricter laws and high-profile court cases and wins, manual scavenging persists rampantly. Yet, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) continue to seek the involvement of courts in order to eradicate manual scavenging, and some scholars claim Dalit NGOs over-rely on litigation. In this thesis, I ask: First, what factors do NGOs in India mention as important in their considerations of when to involve courts in their efforts to eradicate manual scavenging? Second, what purpose do these NGOs explicitly ascribe to litigation in these efforts? I answer these questions through software-assisted qualitative analysis of data from interviews with and documents of a total of 23 NGOs. I draw on the lenses of legal mobilisation and active citizenship to construct a comprehensive grounded theory. Overall, I find that NGOs aim to shift responsibility towards the government, remind it of its duty to serve its citizens, and renegotiate government strategy especially in the context of neoliberal governance, which is marked by state absence and neglect towards manual scavengers. Given the difficulties especially Dalit-led NGOs face in influencing the policy process, I contend litigation emerges as the main venue through which they believe they can make any advances. As existing literature suggests, legal mobilisation occurs when it is considered the most promising venue, and NGOs for instance mention their own caste status and budget, the risk of litigation causing further harms for manual scavengers, the likelihood of a mandamus remedy, and other factors as relevant when choosing litigation. My research also provides the first dataset on manual scavenging-related litigation in India, and goes beyond existing literature in focusing not only on public interest litigation. My thesis contributes to a detailed understanding of the importance of access to courts for marginalised groups, and paves the way for future research on whether litigation on manual scavenging ‘works’.