by Rose George
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.
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 ball-pen, . . . 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 th
e 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 transf
ormation 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.)