Gourisankar Ghosh was working as an engineer in India in the 1970s before he went on to head the UN’s Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. Ghosh thinks Pathak and Sulabh have been revolutionary. “In the 1970s in India no one was talking about sanitation. Worldwide not even the World Bank was addressing it. People were suspicious of Pathak because he’s a self- made man. So he did it on his own, without UNDP or state support. He’s a visionary and a pathmaker.”
This may explain the messianic aura that surrounds Pathak. He is treated with insistent subservience by his staff, and described in a history of Sulabh as possessing “awesome innocence” and “manners which are compelling.” Powerful men in India are shown deference as a matter of course, but a British sanitation expert who knows Pathak expresses astonishment at “the amazing cult of personality around him.” In a foreword to the Sulabh history, Pathak writes that “I do not claim the eminence of Faraday, who invented dynamo, Lazslo Biro, inventor of ballpen, . . . Einstein, or that of unknown Assyrian who invented the wheels, or of the Caveman who ‘invented’ fire but one thing is common between me and those great names: none of them was an engineer.”
Neither was Pathak. To promote his Easy Latrine, he had to battle for thirty years with suspicious World Bank–influenced engineers who intended to carry on installing what they’d always installed: unsuitable waterborne treatment plants that were prohibitively expensive to run for Indian municipalities and whose maintenance required levels of expertise that rarely existed. Nonetheless, Pathak’s efforts have won awards. In 1992, he became the first man to take the topic of latrines to the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II awarded him a St. Francis of Assisi medal. In 1995, he was the Limca Records (the Indian Guinness) Man of the Year. Despite this, writes the Indian journalist S. P. Singh, Pathak remains “indifferent to fame and fortune,” seeking only to “rescue scavengers from the tyranny of the social system in which one man’s excreta is another man’s headload.”
This may be true. But causes cost money, and the Easy Latrine didn’t bring in enough revenue to cover Sulabh’s running expenses. He decided to build public toilets, too.
In the 1970s, public facilities in India were a rare sight. The few in existence were squalid and offered little advantage to defecating on the pavement outside, so people often chose the street instead. Pathak had an idea that was simple, new, and apparently doomed. If people had a clean toilet with water and light, they’d probably be willing to pay for it. “ People laughed at me,” he recalls. “They said, in Bihar, people don’t pay for bus tickets and rail tickets. Why would they pay for toilets?”
But his negotiation skills served him well, because in 1973 the first Sulabh public toilet opened in Patna, the state capital of Bihar. It had water, electricity, and round- the- clock attendants. Sulabh charged one rupee for toilet use, and urinals for men were free (women could also urinate for free, but they have to specify their needs to the caretaker). A wash cost two rupees. In the first day, Pathak says, five hundred people used it.
Gourisankar Ghosh remembers working in 1980 in an office in Kolkata that overlooked a lake. “One morning I saw a lot of activity and someone told me someone was building a toilet. I little realized that people had no public toilet. I never thought it would work but once it was built I saw women and men coming to use it. I was amazed. It cost one-fortieth of a dollar and they were using it happily.”
Sulabh’s concept of pay- per- use was not new—a similar government program had been tried and failed several years earlier. The business model was. Instead of funding toilets with government grants, Sulabh approached authorities and municipalities and suggested something different: if the authority paid for the cost of constructing the toilet and provided the land, Sulabh would run it for a set number of years and keep the profits. The business model was an attractive one to municipal authorities who, back then, could not be bothered with sanitation. “Before, no one wanted to know,” says Pathak. “In the beginning, we couldn’t find anyone willing to tender to construct toilets. The upper castes wouldn’t consider it. They wouldn’t even come to meetings. Now they fight for the tenders. We have blended social reform and economic gain.”
In Mumbai, I take a tour of Sulabh’s public conveniences. My host is Chandra Mohan, the head of Sulabh’s Mumbai branch. Like other senior Sulabh employees, he began volunteering for Sulabh after retiring from a top business position. Other Sulabh men were high up in the civil service. Good connections help business.
We whiz through Mumbai in a white Ambassador, India’s greatest car and a vehicle that manages to feel luxurious even when it’s decrepit, for it sits its passengers high and it has lines as noble as its name. All the stops on the bathroom tour are on prime Mumbai real estate. There is a Sulabh next to Mumbai city hall and another by the Gateway of India. Sulabh also has the only establishment operating on the city’s famous Chowpatty beach. There used to be others, but Mumbai is cleaning itself up, and they were demolished for aeshetic and health reasons (they were ugly and stank). Some of Sulabh’s 750 Mumbai toilet blocks are in slum areas. “We cross- subsidize them,” says Mohan. “The ones in high- volume areas bring in money to pay for the ones in poor areas that don’t.”
He takes me to a public toilet near the headquarters of Indian Express, a prestigious weekly magazine. It is well kept and pristine, unlike many government- supplied toilets. I ask him why Sulabh has succeeded where the state has failed. “Government property is everyone’s property. Toilet stall doors are taken away overnight. People do not respect it.” They have problems in Sulabh toilets, too. In the Indian Express Sulabh, Mohan strides as usual into the ladies’ and finds several women doing their washing on the floor while a tap in the sink gushes uselessly. He chastises them. They are pavement dwellers, he tells me. They don’t
know the meaning of taps or the value of water, because they’ve never had it before. The pavement dwellers are here because Sulabh gives them a free weekly pass. The women crowd around me outside to show me their ID cards. Name, occupation, the Sulabh logo of a woman carrying a headload of excreta, with a red cross over the unpalatable image, residence.
Residence? “I live near the bus shelter,” says one, and she means on the ground. “I live on that pavement over there,” says another. They are officially BPLers—Below the Poverty Line—and are entitled to rations. Their piece of pavement is usually rented from a local slumlord or gangster. At least with the Sulabh card, they can wash for free. They can get some dignity along with rice.
Sulabh has innovated in other ways: some Sulabh toilets also house primary schools. Others have health clinics attached. As impressive an achievement as that is—as any traveler stuck waiting for an Indian train will appreciate—Pathak is proudest of the effects his business has had on scavengers. Sixty thousand have been “liberated” as a result of Pathak’s efforts. Some are given alternative employment as cleaners in Sulabh toilet blocks. Nonetheless, a Sulabh employee tells me that hierarchies still persist. Scavengers will always be the lowliest cleaners. “The caretakers will be Brahmins, because they’re the ones collecting the money.”
Six thousand wards of scavengers have also been given education at Sulabh Public School on the Delhi campus. It provides education with a message: the intake is scavenger and non- scavenger to encourage mixing. All children learn in English because it is the language of the educated, employable Indian. Classes are also taught in Sanskrit, the school head teacher tells me, “because that is the language of the Brahmins.” Sanskrit is a shocking thing to teach a scavenger child, and therefore makes a powerful point.
Pathak tells me with pride about a program in Rajasthan, whereby twenty- eight scavenger women were given the opportunity to sell snacks for a living. It sounds a modest achievement. But even after three decades of trying to eradicate untouchability, getting an Indian to eat food prepared by a scavenger is a big deal. The Rajasthani snack women may be few, but the number is incidental. The point is that Indians will now buy food from people who used to disgust them so much, they would not touch their shadows. Even Pathak’s Sulabh colleague Mulkh Raj admits that the habit of untouchability is still formidable enough to affect his own thinking. “You can share lunch with scavengers,” he says, “but you’d never marry a scavenger girl. It’s wrong to pretend this doesn’t exist.”
Pathak’s other great achievement, in his eyes, was to make toilet talkable. “In India until few years ago,” he wrote in 2004, “nobody could imagine that any politician, bureaucrat or businessman of some standing would like to associate his name with anything even remotely connected to something as ordinary as toilet. Now things have changed and most prominent politicians (including Ministers and Chief Ministers), high- position bureaucrats and well- known businessmen readily agree and rarely decline to inaugurate the opening of public toilets in the country.” When Sulabh set up an adopt- a- scavenger system, top politicians invited scavengers into their home to share food and sponsored their education.
For Pathak, the toilet was always a means to achieve his end. He said in one interview that “Gandhi used the spinning wheel to enter families’ homes; we’re entering through the toilet.” Even his critics—of whom I find very few, despite looking—admit that he has changed Indian society. Paromita Vohra featured Pathak in her documentary about public toilet provision in Mumbai, Q2P. The film manages to be ethereal and earthy, and features a fine example of Indian humor when, during a “Take Back the Night” march, some young women looking for a public toilet ask another marcher, a middle-aged woman, whether they can pee on a certain patch of ground. “Can we sit here?” they ask. “Is it a religious place?” “Go!” says the woman. “You sit and make it religious!”
Vohra has mixed feelings about Sulabh and its “Visionary Founder.” “If the goal of Pathak is to have eliminated scavenging, then he’s failed. And I find Sulabh very paternalistic. But the guy is a Brahmin and he built the first public toilet in India. You can’t take that away from him.”
Nor can anyone challenge his status as the founder of the world’s best-known toilet museum. In 1994, Pathak realized that maybe not everybody shared his delight in pour-flush privies and the transformation of scavengers to snack- sellers and cleaners. He decided to “make toilets interesting.” During a visit to London’s Madame Tussaud’s, he got an idea. Why not build a museum of toilets? Letters were dispatched to all foreign embassies in Delhi, asking for information about their country’s toilet habits. The British provided a small booklet on the work of Mr. Thomas Crapper. The Counselor for Scientific and Technological Affairs at the U.S. embassy could offer only the address of the American Society of Sanitary Engineering, and the suggestion that Sulabh’s idea of playing the national anthem of various nations as one approaches their toilet in the exhibit might be “something that many people might object to. A simple sign explaining the exhibit may be less controversial.”
Pathak gathered the exhibits on his global travels. The collection is impressive, but it still fits easily into a single room on the campus, next door to the biogas research lab. Replicas of historically relevant commodes, toilets, and latrines are placed alongside a microwave toilet—used in ships—and a portable privy aimed at campers. There is a French commode disguised as English books, including a Shakespeare play. “The French always used English titles for books,” says my guide, as if he can’t imagine why. In the center of the room, in a glass display case, there is a model of the Sulabh public toilet at Shirdi, supposedly the largest in the world, which has 120 toilets, 108 bathing cubicles, 28 special toilets, six dressing rooms, and 5,000 lockers, as well as a biogas system. (I later make a 10- hour round trip to spend an hour at Shirdi, and on the road wonder as usual where I will find a toilet, before I remember where I’m going.)
On the walls hang densely detailed displays relating to sanitary history. Visitors who trek out to the airport area—they are more numerous, since the museum was included in the Lonely Planet Guide to India a couple of years ago—will get an education. They can learn that the best and first flush toilets were built five millennia ago in the Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and that Ben Affleck once bought Jennifer Lopez a jewel- encrusted toilet seat (though she’s now moved on to the TOTO Neorest). They can be enlightened by one poster that elucidates the Su- jok therapy devised by Korean scientist Park Jae Woo, which I will include here in a spirit of public health because it served me well during ensuing months of research in toilet- deficient places. Should the urge to defecate strike, take a pen, pencil, or blunt object and trace a line, deeply and with pressure, in a clock wise direction on the left palm or counterclockwise on the right. The urge, assures Dr. Park, “will immediately cease. You too can try sometime and feel the magic pressure in reverse order will give good relief in constipation.”
A visitors’ book collects comments, some with expected humor, some serious. Jack Sim of the WTO has left his compliments. Nana Ziesche thought it “such a big history part never taught in school. What a pity.” Swiss tourist Jonathan Hecker offered his congratulations because “this is exactly what we need to pull sanitation out of its dirty corner.”
Pathak intends to keep pulling. He has plans for a University of Sanitation. He will also amend the nonprofit model and accept grants. There is still much work to do and Sulabh needs help to do it. Despite the organization’s achievements, half a million Indians are still cleaning dry latrines. “Seen in that context,” Pathak tells me, “Sulabh has achieved almost nothing.” A Sulabh colleague is also gloomy. “Sanitation is a gigantic problem,” he says. “The world needs a thousand Sulabhs, a hundred Dr. Pathaks. What Sulabh does is a drop in the ocean.”
Pathak prefers to see things more brightly. “We are still at the beginning of the beginnings,” he once said. “We are a candle in the dark.” And the dark doesn’t frighten him. This is the man who transformed teenage rebellion into a toilet revolution, and overturned profoundly held beliefs about purity and pollution in the process. “It’s totally amazing,” he tells me by way of a farewell. “Scavengers used to be afraid of our shadows. But look. The earth and sky can meet.”
“Going to the Sulabh” from the book THE BIG NECESSITY by Rose George. Copyright © 2008 by Rose George. Used by arrangement with the publisher Henry Holt and Company, New York.
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