Delhi is trying to end manual scavenging by using sewer cleaning machines. Are its efforts working? Two years after the project launch, little appears to have changed for the capital’s sanitation workers. The Delhi government's new machine at work in Srinivaspuri. | Salik Ahmed/ Article-14 It is an hour before dusk, and a blue vehicle of a small truck’s size is backing into a congested lane in a southern neighbourhood in India’s teeming capital city. Dust-caked cars and motorcycles line the road in Srinivaspuri, under a menacing mesh of electricity wires. Two sanitation workers guide the driver as he reverses the vehicle, inch-by-inch, dodging a low-hanging wire here, a vehicle’s rear view mirror there and steers slowly to the end of the narrow lane. When he parks, the workers remove long iron hooks from the vehicle and use them to lift the lid of a blocked manhole, revealing a bubbling, filthy drain.