In 1836, Nikolai Gogol, the Ukrainian-Russian playwright, wrote The Government Inspector as a satirical comedy to highlight the large-scale corruption and greed of 19th century imperial Russia. The plot revolves around a case of mistaken identity, when a lowly young civil servant from Saint Petersburg is mistaken for a high-ranking government inspector by the members of a provincial town. While it might have been written to lampoon the then czar, the timelessness of the play is something that many will vouch for.

In fact, Mumbai-based playwright Rahul Ramchandani's latest outing, The Sanitation Inspector, is inspired by Gogol's classic. "When I read the play, it stayed with me. But, what compelled me to write my own script were news reports about sanitation workers dying," he says. As part of his research, he also watched Anand Patwardhan's documentary, Jai Bhim Comrade, a remarkable film on how work of sanitation in India is still inevitably assigned to Dalits. "When we can send satellites to Mars, why are we still making a group of people do manual scavenging?" he says. The play is set in a fictitious town, Bandal Pur, where a sanitation worker has attempted suicide due to lack of facilities. Like Gogol's play, the story hinges on a case of comedy of errors. "A conman fugitive is mistaken for someone else, and it's about how he starts taking advantage of the situation."