FEBRUARY 05 - 11, 2018 has mobilised the authorities and administrators across the country. Now, children are doing the job of whistle blowers and asking people not to defecate out in the open. The number of men and women defecating in the open has drastically gone down. In the early 20th century, it was Mahatma Gandhi who raised the issues of cleanliness and toilets for the first time in India. When Mahatma Gandhi was in Phoenix Ashram in Durban in South Africa, he used the trench latrine system. He had a big farm house in about 128 acres and he used to shift the trench latrine from one place to another and after each use he would fill it with soil. On his second trip to India from South Africa, Gandhiji attended the Congress session in Calcutta. The sanitary condition of the Congress camp was horrible. Some delegates used the verandah in front of their room as latrines and nobody objected to it. Gandhiji reacted immediately. When he spoke to the volunteers, they said; “This is not our job, this is a sweeper’s job.” Gandhiji asked for a broom and himself cleaned the filth. He was then dressed in western style. The volunteers were astonished but none came forward to assist him. Years later, when Gandhiji became the guiding star of the Indian National Congress, volunteers formed a cleaning squad in the Congress camps. Two thousand teachers and students were specially trained for doing scavenging at the Haripura Congress session. Gandhiji could not think of having a set of people labelled as untouchables for cleaning filth and dirt. He wanted to abolish untouchability from India. Gandhiji was so moved by this inhumane practice that he suggested two things to stop the practice of open defecation. First, to use trench latrines as much as possible and the second was to put soil on the human excreta after defecation. It was popularized in India as “tatti pe mitti”. Gandhiji gave these two suggestions but he also wanted a scientific toilet so that people could use toilets and not defecate in the open. He believed that only technology could provide a solution to stop the inhuman practice of cleaning dry latrines with hand. Gandhi had said that he wanted a clean India first, Independence later. I was troubled by the pathetic conditions of the untouchables, and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and teachings in 1968, I vigorously applied my mind to come up with a suitable technology that could replace dry latrines and eventually bring an end to the problem of cleaning bucket toilets and the
dry pit toilets by the community of ‘untouchables’ in India. My idea was not just to provide a solution but to cleanse a belief system and liberate the society that remained imprisoned in the formulaic traditions which encouraged caste-based discrimination against scavengers who worked as manual scavengers. My actions are that of cleansing and reforming a system and give them the dignity that was denied to them for thousands of years. For these women, their freedom, voice and basic human rights were forfeited the moment they were born as they were perceived to belong to the lowest stratum of India’s caste-based society – the Dalits, formerly known as ‘untouchables’. By virtue of their birth, they worked as manual scavengers, cleaned dry latrines and faced severe social discrimination. I also simultaneously spearheaded a movement to restore the dignity and rights of the untouchables. In 1968, strongly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and personally witnessing caste-based discrimination practised in my own family against Dalits in the state of Bihar, I took a resolution to free them from the shackles of modern day slavery and dedicated my life for this cause. I invented a sustainable technology known as a two-pit pourflush ecological toilet, which could replace the bucket toilets that need manual scavengers for cleaning it and eventually bring an end to this inhuman practice. I started the sanitation movement to liberate the manual scavengers; the houses in rural areas did not have toilets. Everyone went out in the open for defecation. Women suffered the most. They had to go out to defecate either before sunrise or after sunset. If they ever felt the need to go during the day, they couldn’t relieve themselves which led to severe health problems. Even in darkness it was not safe for them because there was always the danger of snake-bites, scorpion stings, animal attacks and also the possibility of sexual violence and rape. Even the schools in rural areas did not have toilets and, therefore, the girls did not feel encouraged to go to schools. The mortality rate was very high and children used to die of diarrhoea, dehydration, cholera, and other diseases. The situation was equally bad in the urban areas. More than 85 per cent houses had bucket toilets, which were cleaned by the untouchables. In slum areas and on the outskirts of towns and cities, people practised open defecation. There was no provision of public toilets near railway stations,
Speech By Dr Bindeshwar Pathak
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Next, I wanted to break the concept of ‘twice born’. I helped them perform rites and rituals of the Brahmins and the other upper caste public places like market yards, bus stops, and religious and tourist places. Foreigners who visited and travelled to India also faced lot of difficulties. The Sulabh flush toilet technology, which I invented to replace the bucket toilets cleaned by the untouchables or by anybody, became a great tool in helping stop open defecation in the villages. Now women in the rural areas go to toilets safely and with dignity with no fear of being attacked. The same technology in schools has helped increase student attendance, especially of young girls. They feel safe and comfortable going to schools. The child mortality rates have also decreased in these areas. In the Sulabh technology, the human excreta gets converted into fertilizer because out of the two pits; one is used at a time and the other remains as a standby. Manual cleaning of human excreta is not required in this system. In addition to this, biofertilizer is produced which can be used to raise the farm productivity, or for horticultural and floricultural purposes. This technology proved to be the effective solution to end the practice of manual cleaning of nightsoil by the untouchable scavengers and defecation in the open. So, about a million scavengers have been freed because of this invention. BBC Horizons has declared the
Sulabh technologies as one of five unique inventions of the world that has a direct bearing on humanity. The low-cost and appropriate toilet technology (popularly known as the Sulabh Shauchalaya System) that I developed and implemented on a pan-India scale is an invention, which has been declared as a Global Best Practice by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. In 1878, an Act was passed in Kolkata in West Bengal to maintain public toilets on pay-and-use basis but it could not work. After a lapse of 96 years I tried this formula again. In 1974, the Patna Municipality, in the eastern Bihar, gave me an opportunity to try and implement this practice. They gave me land and cost of construction of toilet complex. They also informed me that I had to charge money from the public for the use of toilets. It was a new concept and after hearing about it, it became a joke in the city. People found it amusing in that somebody had to pay to use a toilet. I was of the opinion that public toilets need to be maintained round the clock, and if it is clean, then everybody will pay to use such a toilet. This was very important. We decided to provide facilities of urinals, wash basin, soap powder and towels in the public toilet and also ensured its