Anjana cradles her baby boy in a dimly lit hut in Gujarat, her eyes welling up as she describes the boy’s name.

Umesh Bamaniya, Anjana’s husband, died while cleaning a choked sewer in April, 10 days before his son was born. He would’ve earned 2,000 rupees (£19; $24) for this work. In Gujarat’s Tharad town, his body was retrieved from a manhole covered in sewage. The 23-year-old was just starting out in life.

Anjana is devastated by the sudden loss of her husband, the family’s breadwinner.

Annamma, hundreds of miles away, lives in a similar situation in Tamil Nadu.

During a factory explosion in Chennai in September, her husband Moses, 40, died from asphyxiation.

Annamma did not even know her husband cleaned sewers until he died. He told us he worked at a canteen and sometimes doubled as a daily wage worker.

Annamma, who has two daughters, is still in shock. Putting money aside and focusing on survival is pointless.

Umesh and Moses are among thousands of sanitation workers from low-caste communities who clean sewers, septic tanks, toilets, and drains manually. Experts say the legal definition of manual scavengers, which only includes people who clean or handle human waste in “insanitary latrines” or railway tracks, is too narrow.

Several federal governments, including the current one, have missed deadlines for declaring India free of manual scavenging.