Hidden in the forests of Chhattisgarh’s Narharpur is a small cement structure with black Hindi letters on the wall: Naveen Shav Griha, a house for the dead. More than 1,200 postmortems have been conducted here in the last 20 years. The person cutting open the bodies is Santoshi Durga, a sanitation worker. Her qualification is not an MBBS but her caste.
Across India—whether in Narharpur or Gurugram, Dharwad or Delhi—thousands of Dalit sanitation workers are forced to perform autopsies. Called “cutters” by the medical fraternity, they get no formal training, protective gear, recognition, or additional compensation. Despite government regulations requiring an MBBS degree as the basic requirement to conduct autopsies, physicians at large do not want to go near decomposing bodies, much less handle the organs. They may supervise from a distance, but the dissection is left to sanitation workers, who are nearly always Dalit.