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A dream come true
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Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh International, has been selected for the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize. He shares his story with RANA SIDDIQUI ZAMAN
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PHOTO: SANDEEP SAXENA
At your service Bindeshwar Pathak at his toilet museum in New Delhi .
A ten-year-old upper caste Brahmin boy touched a scavenger (an ‘untouchable’) out of curiosity to know “what happens” to him after doing so. He was curious because his strict grandmother had instructed him to stay away from such people. After the “blasphemous act” he was forcibly “purified” by swallowing “cow’s urine mixed with sand and Ganga Jal”.
Now 60, this rebellious soul has become a champion for the cause of the toilet cleaners and scavengers. The man has made 7500 public toilets in India and in the process has liberated and rehabilitated over 60000 people who used to carry human excreta as head load and has made 240 towns scavenging free.
No wonder he was awarded the Padma Bhushan (1991) and the International St. Francis Prize (by Pope John Paul II, 1992). The latest feather in his cap is the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate that he would formally receive in August this year at Stockholm.
Meet Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh International movement. It is chiefly because of him that today we have modern toilets in India. We may still get a little unnerved while talking of toilets and scavengers, but Pathak talks about it with the pride of a patriot. This is the cause for which he has struggled emotionally, financially and physically.
Gandhi’s dream
“This is an emotional scar which still hasn’t faded,” says a smiling Pathak about the “purifying” incident, adding he fell into the cause “by accident” and made it his goal. After doing his B.Sc. in Criminology from B.N. College in his native Patna, he was preparing to do M.Sc. from Madhya Pradesh University but an incident changed his life.
“I was standing at the station when two people from Bihar Gandhi Centenary Committee came to me and said, ‘If you become a lecturer after two years you will earn Rs.450 per month. But if you join the Committee, you will get a permanent post and big money from now. And you will also fulfil Gandhiji’s dream of a scavenger-free India.’ I followed them as I was earning only five rupees as a teacher in a local school then.” But, there was no such post and Pathak had also missed the last date for admissions. So, he worked there for five months as a translator without pay. But the place made him aware of scavengers’ problems and issues. He also witnessed two life-changing incidents.
Recalls this expert on low-cost sanitation, “I saw a newlywed girl from a scavenger family of Bihar’s Thithiya scavenger community wailing. She was forced by her in-laws to clean local toilets. She didn’t want to do it. And a young boy was hit by a bull on the road. The public rushed to help him. But someone shouted from the back that he was from the scavenger community. People halted. No one went near him and he died. The incidents made me feel guilty and I decided to fulfil Gandhiji’s dream.”
Pathak lived with the Thithiya community, a step that shocked his own family and in-laws. “I told my father-in-law that I was going to turn history. Till then, he would have to maintain his daughter. And he did so for nine years!”
It was in 1969 that he developed low cost two-pit toilet system within the expensive septic tank, and made the first two Sulabh Shauchalayas in Arrah, Buxar. It became a revolution and by 1974, Sulabh was recognised by Bihar Government. Pathak is no scientist but he discovered technologies that even civil engineers couldn’t.
Today, his Museum of Toilet at Palam (Delhi) — the world’s first and only one of its kind — houses the latest technologies in sanitation, rural development and alternate employment.
“Application of mind is more important than knowledge,” concludes Pathak.
ON THE CARDS
India’s first University of Sanitation (for students and
administrators) at Gurgaon
A photo feature of medieval hairstyles in the toilet museum
to encourage hairstylists/ fashion designers to visit
A new museum of toilets at Gurgaon on 44 acres
Release of “New Princes of Alwar” on women scavengers-turned-professionals, written by journalists, compiled by Pathak
Sulabh toilets in Madagascar, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Laos
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