Chennai sanitation strike lands in court

The garbage has been piling up in Chennai. For nearly two weeks, thousands of sanitary workers employed on contract by the Greater Chennai Corporation have refused to lift it, gathering instead outside Ripon Buildings in a protest that has grown into a test case for labour rights in the city. They are demanding that the corporation honour a 2021 promise to regularise their jobs and are opposing the move to hand core sanitation work to private firms. Their strike has now travelled to the Madras High Court, which will hear a writ petition on 13 August challenging the privatisation plan and seeking enforcement of permanent employment.

More than 3,000 workers, many serving for over a decade under the National Urban Livelihoods Mission, have sat down before Ripon Buildings, staging a public insistence: preserve their dignity, preserve their livelihoods. In 2021, the chief minister himself had promised regularisation. Now that hope is slipping under the privatisation stamp, replaced by the threat of pay cuts: from Rs 23,000 to Rs 15,000 monthly, stripped of PF, ESI, leave benefits, even protective gear.

With every passing day, Chennai neighborhoods suffer under heaps of refuse. Garbage seems both symbol and strategy: a slow-burning protest that visually and viscerally disrupts civic life. An estimated 6,000 to 10,000 tonnes lay uncollected, choking roads and rattling households across nearly 4.5 million residents.

GCC turned to Chennai Enviros (Ramky) for relief, hiring 2,800 temporary workers and deploying trucks, compactors, and cranes—yet only 238 battery-operated vehicles arrived, far short of the 1,300 needed. The result: just 1,400 tonnes cleared from four wards. Despite some improvement, residents report overflowing bins, stray cattle, waterlogging, and brewing health threats.

Negotiations have repeatedly collapsed. Seven rounds of talks involving HR & CE minister P.K. Sekarbabu, Mayor R. Priya, GCC officials, and union leaders ended in stalemate. The union rhetoric hardened—from contesting wage cuts to demanding permanence.

The strike fractured: protest numbers halved to about 1,500. That allowed private operations to clear an estimated 18,000 tonnes in three days—an efficiency argument GCC is using to expand the privatisation drive across the city. Officials frame this as accountability and service quality, pointing to fewer absences and more visible work, even if it doesn’t heal the protest.

Beyond the streets, chambers of justice weigh the city’s pivot. Two writs are now before the High Court: one by the UUI against outsourcing in Zone 6, and the other regarding the legality of the ₹100 crore “sanipreneur” scheme (AABCS), which aimed to turn sanitation workers into entrepreneurs. Critics allege favoritism, fund misappropriation, and that beneficiaries included party affiliates instead of the intended beneficiaries. The scheme’s enablers—DICCI and private contractors—drew criticism that became a backdrop in court, prompting calls for restructuring.

In and out of courtrooms, Chennai is engaged in a battle over who cleans the city, and, by extension, over the meaning of citizenship in a place that sells itself as the exemplar of the “Dravidian model.” On one side stand the workers—overwhelmingly drawn from Dalit communities—whose labour has long been the city’s unspoken foundation. On the other side, a municipal administration that insists it is modernising, streamlining, and delivering efficiency through private contracts. The CPM and Naam Tamilar Katchi have planted their flags firmly with the protestors, calling privatisation not just an economic misstep but a betrayal of social justice, an abdication of the State’s responsibility to those at the bottom of its own hierarchy. The DMK government, under pressure, frames the dispute in procedural terms: file your petitions, wait for due process, let the courts decide. The juxtaposition is hard to miss—a city that proclaims its commitment to upliftment while shuffling to the margins the very people who, each dawn, carry away its waste so others can forget it existed at all.

August 13 may determine whether this is a judgment only on wages, or an adjudication on the social fabric: whether sanitation is a contracted service or a civic covenant, and whether the city can afford to ignore the dignity of those who clean it.

ChennaigarbageMadras High Courtsanitation workers strikeTamil Nadu