Occupational Caste Groups’ Illness and Health in India : Lessons from the Lives of Conservancy Workers

s "Occupational Caste Groups' Illness and Health in India: Lessons from the Lives of Conservancy Workers" (2025) is an ethnographic account that critically examines the relationship between caste-identity and access to healthcare in India.At the heart of the ethnography are the Hadis of Jharkhand, a Scheduled Caste community traditionally engaged in manual scavenging.Situated in the Hadi Cooli in the municipal town of Chas at Bokaro district, the study focuses on the perceptions of illness and the health-seeking practices among the Hadis.The monograph makes an ambitious claim as the first dedicated ethnographic study of the Hadis of Jharkhand, marking a clear departure from previous scholarship that largely focused on macroanalyses of dominant castes, leaving smaller sub-castes unexamined.Moving beyond simplistic economic analyses, the study illustrates how stigma and caste identity shape illness perception and healthcare resource utilisation.Instead of treating illness as simply as a biological phenomenon, chapter one, foregrounds how 'perception' functions as a framework which determines how illness is socially constructed at familial and community levels.Perceptions determine how disease is to be navigated through and negotiated with, often creating an iceberg phenomenon where common symptoms such as joint pain, tiredness or headaches