New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday assured the Supreme Court that it would strive to bring in a new law to abolish manual scavenging across the country and peg it on right to dignity and life to make it mandatory for the states to implement it.

Repeated adjournments sought by the Union government for getting the Prohibition of Employment of Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, had irked a bench headed by Justice H L Dattu so much that it had observed on last Friday that if the Bill was not getting through the legislative process, the government must bring in an ordinance to put an end to manual scavenging.