"Our father left the house around 7 am. At noon, a man came home and informed us that our father had died. He was cleaning the sewer and suddenly fainted. He had inhaled the poisonous gases," recalled 17-year-old Khushboo, one of the three daughters of Bijender Kumar, a resident of north Delhi's Rohini.

A sewer cleaner in outer Delhi's Narela, 47-year-old Bijender died after opening multiple sewers in March 2021. His daughters -- Khushboo (17), Sona (14) and Anokhi (10) – are now orphaned.

The girls had lost their mother eight years ago. They had often feared for their father's health due to the risks associated with his work.

When they went to the doctor, Bijender was advised to quit this risky profession. "I often asked him to leave this job but he said he was only doing it to provide for us," added Khushboo.

"And so, he continued to do that work," she said, with tears in her eyes.

The siblings have received financial aid of Rs 10 lakh from the Delhi government. The loss of their father, however, haunts them daily. "We will never get our father back," they told The Quint.

As Khushboo took out her father's wallet from a transparent polythene bag, she said, "We will never spend this money.” The black batua (wallet) and a cracked mobile phone are the only material memories that the 17-year-old and her two sisters have of their father.

"I don’t want my son to do the work that I do now. I want him to be a doctor," said Sachin, as he caressed his one-year-old son, Lavyansh.

When The Quint met him in 2021, 21-year-old Kumar had already spent six years working as a sewer cleaner in north Delhi – a job that he took over from his father.

His father had done this work for 15 years. But cleaning sewers, which often requires a person to delve deep into a manhole filled with toxic gases, was never Kumar's first choice.

"My father's drinking problem peaked when I was in class 9 and he would beat up my mother and spend all that he earned on alcohol. My mother had no option but to work as a domestic help. When that wasn't enough, she started segregating garbage and reselling it to put food on the table," Kumar told The Quint.

Kumar quit school and began working as a daily wage labourer at weddings. Soon enough, he would follow the footsteps of his father and start cleaning sewers — an extreme life risk that he takes, for Rs 400 a day.

"Just because we hail from a lower caste shouldn't mean that we will do this job... The needy will take up any work they get," he lamented.

He tried doing other jobs like working at weddings but eventually returned to cleaning sewers. When The Quint met him in 2021, Sachin claimed that he had not received any training or any financial assistance from state and central governments.