Then you will be led into the hall, presented with a beautiful silk scarf and a garland of flowers, and you will watch while children in neat blue uniforms, the girls with red ribbons in their plaited hair, sing the Sulabh song whose lyrics exhort you to “come together and build a happy Sulabh world.” These are the children of the Sulabh school, housed in a complex on the other side of a yard of demonstration pit latrine models. It is a unique school because two-thirds of its intake are the children of manual scavengers. The education they are given here ensures that their parents’ job will not also be theirs, one day. It is a happy scene, but it has been built on forty years of one man’s stubborn conviction that scavenging is a sickness in his culture, and that toilets can heal it.
In the late 1960s, the young Pathak committed a grievous sin. He was studying sociology, and like many young Indians getting used to being part of a newly independent and ambitious nation, he was an idealist. His ideals were those of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The father of the modern Indian nation was one of the few political leaders in history to publicly talk about toilets. There is a scene in Richard Attenborough’s biopic film where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing.
Gandhi also argued with everyone else. At the 1901 Congress Party convention, he told delegates it was a disgrace that manual scavengers were being used to clean the latrines. He asked delegates to clean their own latrines and when they did not, he publicly cleaned his own. The eradication of manual scavenging was a recurrent theme throughout Gandhi’s life. He called the practice “the shame of the nation.” He wrote, “Evacuation is as necessary as eating; and the best thing would be for everyone to dispose of his own waste.”
For a great politician to talk freely about such things in public was impressive, but Gandhi’s position had its critics. Plenty of Dalits object to Gandhi’s comparing scavengers with mothers looking after others’ children, when the children are upper- caste Indians content to keep these “mothers” in a state of servitude. The great Dalit politician Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who thought that “inequality was the soul of Hinduism,” wanted caste to be abolished, not tinkered with.
In 1969, the idealistic young Pathak began to volunteer with the Gandhian Centenary Committee in his home state of Bihar. The committee’s job was to organize three years of programs and celebrations in honor of their hero’s birth. Their hero cared about scavengers, so the volunteers were supposed to do the same. It scandalized his orthodox Brahmin family.
In his spacious office at Sulabh headquarters, Pathak, now sixty- four, tells a family anecdote. “When I was a child, I wanted to know why some people were untouchable. I wanted to see what would happen if I touched one, so I did.” His grandmother made him eat cow dung and sand, drink cow urine, then take a ritual bath. How can dung be clean? Purity rituals that seem to defy sense are common to many cultures: ancient Mesopotamians carried dung around their necks to ward off evil; Hindus decided that cow dung is holy. Such classifications of what is dirty and what is pure are obviously not about reality, but they serve a purpose. Investing dirt with power makes it more manageable.
Deciding that some people are irreversibly impure makes them more manageable, too. They can be kept in their place. Even so, writes Virginia Smith in Clean, her history of hygiene, “Distancing yourself from poisons, dust and dirt is one thing, but distancing yourself from invisibly ‘unclean’ people and objects is quite an achievement of the imagination.” It was a leap of imagination that Pathak refused to make.
Instead, a few years later, he risked more cow punishment by going to live with scavengers. There, he found both outrage and a vocation. He couldn’t believe people lived in such conditions. The state of Bihar had for years been running a latrine- building program statewide in an attempt to remove the dry latrines that scavengers had to clean. Yet the women carrying head-loads of excrement were still there. “Scavengers’ appalling hardship, humiliation and exploitation,” Pathak wrote, “have no parallel in human history. [. . . It is] the utmost violation of human rights.”
Gandhi’s tactics of encouraging brotherly love across caste boundaries and urging Indians to clean their own latrines had failed miserably. The status quo was too convenient. Pathak decided a better solution was to provide an alternative technology. Scavengers’ jobs would never be surplus to India’s needs, not with a population of a billion excreting people. Perhaps the solution was to make scavengers unemployable by eradicating dry latrines. Not by knocking them down, but by providing a better latrine model that didn’t require humans to clean it but was cheap and easy. Most important, it had to be easy to keep nice. Given a choice between a smelly, dirty latrine and the street, even the most desperate might choose the latter. Pathak read WHO manuals about pit latrines, and developed his own version.
It had to be on- site, because India has neither water nor sewers enough to install expensive waterborne treatment systems. Even today, only 232 of India’s 5,233 towns have even partial sewer coverage. Indian urban wastewater treatment consists of dumping it in rivers. The mighty Yamuna River, which supposedly dropped to earth from heaven but actually runs nearly 200 miles from the Himalayas through the nation’s capital, has millions of gallons of sewage poured into it every day. By the time it reaches Delhi, the Yamuna is dead. As for the Ganges, its fecal coliform count makes its supposedly purifying waters a triumph of wishful thinking, unless the purification is the kind you get from chronic diarrhea, dysentery, or cholera.
Pathak called his new latrine the Sulabh Shauchalaya (Easy Latrine). It was twin- pit and pour- flush. It could be flushed with only a cupful of water, compared to the dozen or so liters needed to operate flush toilets. There was no need to connect it to sewers or septic tanks, because the excreta could compost in one pit, and when that was full, after two to four years, the latrine owner could switch to the other, leaving the full pit to compost. This was another Gandhian concept. The Mahatma had used the phrase tatti par mitti (soil over shit) and would dig a pit for his own excreta then cover it with soil when it was full. The Great Soul of India was a pioneering composter. The Easy Latrine leached its liquids into the ground but supposedly without polluting groundwater. And it was cheap, with the most inexpensive model costing only 500 rupees ($10).
Despite all this, Pathak’s technology found no takers for three years. He had to sell some of his wife’s jewelry, and resorted to peddling his grandfather’s bottles of home- cure remedies. Until one day, when he entered an office in a town in Bihar and sold the idea of the Sulabh model to the municipal officer on duty. The Sulabh model consisted of more than the latrine. It was also a method. Pathak saw how the aid and grant- making world worked. Budgets and donor cycles are fixed. They can be withdrawn after a few years with little notice. Pathak decided that Sulabh would not accept grants. It would make sanitation a business that paid for itself.
It doesn’t sound radical but it was. In the 1970s, development experts were convinced that poor people wouldn’t pay for sanitation. Since then, this has been proven to be nonsense. Poor people pay up to ten times more for water—from water gangsters or private tankers—than a resident with municipal water supply. UK regulations concluded that spending more than 3 percent of the household budget on water was an indicator of hardship. But poor people in Uganda, for example, spend 22 percent of their budget on it.
Pathak thought people would pay, so he developed a range of models for all budgets and tastes. His social service organization would be nonprofit, but it would be a business. This thinking was new.
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