The Hindu : New Delhi News : President has a unique date

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Saturday, Jul 26, 2008
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New Delhi

President has a unique date

Smriti Kak Ramachandran

Photo: Shanker Chakravarty

An honour: President Pratibha Patil with Sulabh worker Usha Chaumar, who was crowned ’Princess of Sanitation Workers’, at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Friday.

NEW DELHI: Usha Chaumar is unsure of how and when a person belonging to a so-called low caste like her can rise to the position of the country’s President as envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi. What she, however, is convinced about is the need to eradicate manual scavenging to release women from the fetters of untouchability.

As president of Nai Disha, a group of liberated manual scavengers, Usha and her colleagues were offered a chance to interact with Pratibha Patil, the country’s first woman President who completed her first year in office on Friday.

“I could never have imagined that I would get a chance to stand in front of the President and speak. I could never imagine that I would board an airplane. My life has changed,” she said with an unmistakable sense of pride.

A neo-literate, Usha now intersperses her sentences with words in English, but she is in no hurry to forget her life when she cleaned night soil in the Alwar district of Rajasthan.

A profession that was passed on to her as a legacy, Usha from age eight followed her mother from one toilet to another, cleaning filth and carrying it on her head. From behind her veil, Usha could not even think of an alternative profession until a chance encounter with Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, who changed her life.

New-found confidence

“Now when people (from the upper castes) come to see me at home, they drink and eat with me. I am no longer the untouchable,” she says with a new-found confidence.

Usha’s life changed for the better after Sulabh International, a pan-India social service outfit that promotes sanitation, health and hygiene, took her under its wings.

Tracing her life from the time she was condemned as a social outcast, Usha narrated her story to President Pratibha Patil and urged her to ensure that no one in the country is made to manually clean toilets.

“About 60 of us have been empowered. We sew, cook and stitch clothes, our self-respect has been restored and expect a promising future for our children.

But there are hundreds of women who continue to toil as manual scavengers, we just want the Government and the President to ensure that they too are given a new lease of life,” said Usha, who recently made news by walking the ramp at a fashion show in New York.

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