Views of Press & People

SULABH MOVEMENT RESTORING HUMAN RIGHTS

NATIONAL and international electronic and print media have reported various Sulabh activities and that of its Founder, Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak. Among the prominent foreign newspapers are : The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail (Canada) and Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Since it is difficult to reproduce all, only some sample Press reports are given below. Among the many Indian newspapers and magazines which reported Sulabh activities are : The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu, The Pioneer, The Statesman, National Herald, Patriot, Deccan Herald (Madras) and a large number of other vernacular newspapers and magazines including India Today and Illustrated Weekly. BBC, All India Radio and Doordarshan have also highlighted Sulabh work. Also, a large number of people had been writing to the Sulabh Founder on a variety of topics, praising his work or making suggestions. Again, some sample letters of persons of global eminence are reproduced.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1980 Less Demeaning Work And Gains in Sanitation Special to The New York Times

PATNA, India-Out of a virtually dormant crusade to free night-soil scavengers from their demeaning labor has come a successful voluntary enterprise that is installing flush latrines in India, cleaning up and deodorizing city streets and providing employment and training for hundreds and potentially thousands.

The organization, called the Easy Toilet Society, was founded 10 years ago by Bindeshwar Pathak, when a 28-year-old sociology student who had grown disenchanted with the inactivity of governmental mencies and fellow members of Gandhian associations.

He gathered a group of designers and engineers and gained the organizing skills of R.L. Das, 28-year-old reformer who had spent most of his life as a propagator of Gandhian ideas, much of it in he so-called Liberation of Scavengers Movement. In this drive Mohandas K. Gandhi sought to abolish the practice in which members of a hereditary undercaste of untouchable sweepers cleaned the toilets of their urban customers and dumped the waste in fields and canals.

For centuries it was such scavengers who provided the basic sanitation for the more prosperous, and even now, despite the commitment of the Central Government to phase out the scavengers, they made indispensable in virtually every Indian city and they remain a shunned and stigmatized group.

SMALL BUT DRAMATIC CHANGES
In the last decade Mr. Pathak's society has been responsible for some relatively small but dramatic changes. It has designed and produced low-cost, flush latrines with shallow, odor-free subtermnean tanks. Here in the state of Bihar it has installed 30,000 units and had converted 10,000 more from old dry-pit latrines.

The state government is subsidizing half the cost of installation, which is less than $100. The society has worked out similar arrangements with half a dozen other Indian states, and it has just been hired by the municipal government of Calcutta to construct thousands of public toilets.

In patna, where the society has built public facilities in several parts of town, a survey showed that they were used daily by 25,000 people who formerly fouled the streets and parks.

Mr. Pathak has become an articulate advocate of the role of voluntary agencies in development and his organization has won the enthusiastic endorsement of international experts. He frequently travels abroad to carry word that groups like his, if they maintain independence from politics and government, can goad national agencies into living up to their commitments.

MUNICIPALLY DONATED LAND
His group is financed by charging 10 percent of the construction costs of its projects. The maintenance costs are covered by collecting a halfpenny charge from those who can afford it; soap costs an additional halfpenny. The poor and women are admitted free.

Mr. Das, who guided visitors around a bank of toilets and showers that the society built next to Patna's new luxury hotel, said the major reason for the success has been Mr. Pathak's "sociological and psychological genius-he knows how to translate ideas into acition and geet people to act."

The old man, now deputy secretary of the society, proudly showed the demonstration tank in concrete in front of the organization's main office which adjoins and is dwarfed by the public toilets. "All over the world there are offices that have toilets, but this must be the first time you have been a toilet that has an office," he said with smile.

Untouchables Gain the Help Of Brahmin By BARBARA CROSSETTE Special to The New York Times

PATNA, India - It was his determination to free poor Indian scavengers from a life of carrying away buckets of screment on their heads that turned Bindeshwar Pathak, an academic social scientist, into a full-time crusader against the humiliations of untouchability. It also made him a celebrity among the poor.

Nearly two decades after taking up the cause of the most wretched laborers, Mr. Pathak, 46 years old, a high-caste Indian Brahmin with a doctorate in sociology, preskles over a small empire of development projects employing 20,000 people nationwide.

It started with toilets.

By converting about half a million traditional latrines to simple pourflush toilets with septic systems, and by building several thousand public bathrooms-the first here in Patna, the capital of Bihar, India's poorest state-Mr. Pathak says his Easy Toilet Institute has freed about 15,000 scavengers for other vocations.

"Gandhi also wanted that these people should be liberated from this subhuman occupation of clearing and burying human excreta," Mr. Pathak said, referring to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of India's Independence struggle who was assassinated in 1948. "But during his life-time, no tangible results could be achieved because the technology was not available."

Power From Public Bath Centers
The research and development of cheap and appropriate sanitation technology has been one of Mr. Pathak's most important programs. He said that only 217 of India's 3,245 major towns and cities have any kind of sewage system. In towns, up to 600,000 people are still employed clearing 7 million toilets with no flush systems.

Persuadi Indians to adopt the pour-flush toilet which was not introduced hereunder the 1960's, was difficult at first, Mr. Pathak said. It was not until he got the backing of the world Health Organization, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program in the late 1970's, that people began to take him seriously.

Mr. Pathak's public bath centers, built where there is likely to be a large number of users, employ only the common Asian system of ground-level, cisternless toilets flushed by pouring in water from a bucket. Sewage is collected in tanks that can be connected to biogas converters. In Patna, waste from the model center creates the electricity that powers the lights of a public park named for the Mahatma Gandhi.

The open-air bath centers, which also provide clean drinking water, showers and a place to wash clothes, are paved and walled, decorated with potted plants or gardens and kept spotlessly clean. Armed guards are also on duty.

Scavengers and the Upper Castes
Mr. Pathak said he believed that his success in keeping hygienic standards high derives from his decision to charge a small fee, a fraction of a cent, to pay for upkeep of the site. In return, a user gets free soap. Other money for what has grown into a nonprofit foundation, Sulabh International, is raised from consultancies and Government contracts.

Mr. Pathak is now experimenting with ways to break down barriers.

"The question is, if scavengers are liberated and rehabilitated, will they attain the same status in society that the upper castes get?" he asked, implying a negative answer.

"So we have started a new programe," he said. "We are persuading brahmins to help them in learning prayers and entering temples - and to dine with them." Sharing food with an untouchable is the most difficult taboo for a Brahmin to overcome.

In a move of uncommon boldness, Mr. Pathak recently led 100 girls from scavenger families into Nathawara, a temple in the Rajasthani city of Udaipur where Brahmins have traditionally prohibited untouchables from worshipping. In the temple, he and other higher caste Hindus are publicly with the children, without incident. He is repeating the gesture elsewhere.

"I have to persuade, not fight with them," he said of his upper caste critics. He is now working on his own home village, Hajipur, in Bihar, where Brahmins have agreed to begin teaching lower-caste people.

"The older people said O.K., but we will not dine with them," Mr. Pathak said. "I think that is all right for a village. We have already come so very far."

Scavenger Class Still Does India's Dirtiest Job

By William Claiborne
Washington Post Foreign Service
NEW DELHI - They can be seen almost anywhere in urban or rural India, wretchedly poor men and women in tattered rags going from house to house and carrying away buckets of human excrement balanced on their heads.

They are called bhangis, or scavengers, and they are members of the lowest rung of a hereditary undercaste of Untouchables, whose occupation Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, the father of Indian independence, vowed to eradicate.

Gandhi once said, "I may not be born again, but if it happens I will like to be born in a family of scavengers so that I may relieve them of the inhuman, unhealthy and hateful practice of carrying headloads of night soil.

The Mahatma's crusade to liberate night-soil scavengers from their demeaning labor has remained little more than a dream during most of India's 37 years of independence. About 600,000 bhangis still collect bucket privies and dump the waste in fields and canals, jaopardizing not only their own health but that of their neighbors.

But now, several private voluntary enterprises, encouraged by the Indian government and aided by United Nations and other international agencies, are making inroads into the scavengers system, installing hundreds of thousands of low-cost, flush latrines with underground septic tanks in Indian homes and rehabilitating thousands of bhangis in the process. This year has been declared the start of the Decade for the Liberation of Scavengers by one of the groups.

The most successful of th voluntary scavenger emancipation enterprises has been the Sulabh Shauchalaya Sansthan, which translates from Hindi literally as the Easy Toilet Society, and which has started something of a mini-revolution in Indian sanitation planning by using entrepreneurial business practices, modern technology and aggressive marketing methods.

The founder of the nonprofit society, Bindeshwar Pathak, said his goal is to nudge the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi into giving the antiscavenger crusade a priority on a par with family planning, and virtually eliminate thee lowly occupation from the Indian caste system.

But, Pathak conceded, his task is formidable. A sample survey of 800,000 households in 110 towns, coriducted by the U.N. Development Program, showed that only 23 percent of the houses have flush toilets of any type. The survey showed that 29 percent of households use dry pits or the bucket privy system that requires scavengers, while 48 percent simply rely on defecating in open fields.

Since conventional water-borne sewage systems are not economi cally practical except in the largest of Indian cities - the World Bank estimates the cost at more than $1,000 per household in densely populated, low-income areas-the voluntary enterprises turned to simple, water-sealed septic stystems that can be built in individual homes for as little as $100.

The Easy Toilet Society was begun in 1973 with an offer by Pathak to build a series of latrines in a public park that because of public defecation had become a health hazard in Patna, the capital of the northern state of Bihar.

Pathak, a former civil servant who had grown frustrated over the creaking bureaucracy and joined the Gandhian movement, recalled that when he sought government aid for his proposal, he was startled to learn from a Bihar State official that funding could be cut off at any time. He said the official advised him, "My dear boy, make your scheme commercially viable so that it can become a success without government aid."

IA / Sanitation crusader preaches new attitudes and low-cost latrines Clean revolution begins with outhouse

By JOHN STACKHOUSE
Development Issues Reporter
New Delhi
BINDESHWAR Pathak is up to his ears in it. He has devoted his life to it, and changed Indian attitudes toward it. He was decorated by the Pope because of it, and has even built a museum to its progress.

The "it" in Mr. Pathak's life is might soil, and the millions of Indian privies, canals, ditches and fields that make the country one of the most unsanitary.

A clean revolution, that is. In his fight to introduce basic sanitation to millions of Indians, Mr. Pathak's weapon of choice is the humble latrine - 700,000 of them, which his organization, Sulabh International, has built in 600 towns across the country, from the mountains of Kashmir to the beaches of Tamil Nadu.

For more than 20 years, the social activist his 30,000 field workers have led a campaign across India to persuade slum dwellers, villagers, travellers, even middle-class office workers to conduct their business in private.

And suddenly they seem to be winning. By Mr. Pathak's calculation, as many as 10 million Indians a day visit a Sulabh toilet.

"It is a true success story in the field of low-cost sanitation," said M.P. Mathur of the New Delhi based National Institute of Urban Affairs.

While few Indians care to discuss it, the matter is one of the most pressing development problems facing the country as it prepares for the 21st century According to the United Nations Children's Fund, 650 million Indians - more than two-thirds of the country's population - lack access to basic sanitation.

In almost any village, town or city, the problem emerges as a crisis every dawn as Indian - women first, then men - head to open fields, ditches or roadsides. As for the Hindu respect for privacy - one scripture calls for people to fire an arrow through the air, and follow it to a suitable site for relief - population growth won out long ago.

The crush of humanity against nature is at its severest in India's swelling cities. Of 5,000 urban areas across the country, only 300 offer public sewers. Even in the pampered capital, New Delhi six out of 10 people have no access to sewerage.

Enter Mr. Pathak. His goal is to cover India's cities with latrines by 2010 and the rest of the country by 2025, a cause that won him the Vatican's's International St. Francis Prize for the Environment in 1992.

Mr. Pathak's crusade is for a modest outhouse, its magic concealed underground. Under each Sulabh latrine, a basic pipe allows waste to flow three or four metres to a brickencased pit big enough to absorb two years worth of waste. The most important part of the technology is the pipe's design, which requires only two litres of water to flush, a fraction of what a modern domestic toilet uses.

The latrine's cover is made of whatever materials can be collected locally : brick in central India, bamboo mat in the tropical south, grass in the northeast, stones in the Rajasthan desert, gunny sacks in Calcutta slums.

As a result, the standard Sulabh latrine costs about $ 150, although one can be built for as little as $ 30. The Indian government pays the full cost of community toilets, and half the cost of individual ones.

In overcrowded slums and high-traffic areas, such as rail and bus stations, Sulabh has constructed community toilets, where one pit can serve 50 people a day. By charging two cents a visit, the latrine centres can afford around-the-clock staff to keep the units clean.

For communities without space, Sulabh designed a toilet on wheels, a community latrine on the back of a truck. The mobile outhouse proved so popular that there now are more than, 1,000 across India. The Indian army shipped one to Somalia for its recent peacekeeping mission.

Mr. Pathak started Sulabh in 1970 in his home state of Bihar, where in Patna, the capital, and estimated 25,000 people every morning fouled the streets and parks. Many more used pans at home, leaving them for low-caste scavengers to remove.

In those days, Mr. Pathak's goal was to free scavengers from a life of degrading servitude, a cause that Mohandas Gandhi first espoused. But he soon decided that India would never rid itself of svavenging without a viable alternative, a toilet technology for the masses.

Mr. Pathak responded with the Easy Toilet Institute, which soon developed thee Sulabh latrine technology that made the devices cheap to install and easy on water.

Although Mr. Pathak continues to fight scavenging (Sulabh runs training centres for scavengers and schools for their children), his most famous contributions to Indian society has been the propagation of privies. So messianic is his zeal that Mr. Pathak founded the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, the first of its kind, he believes any where.

The idea is to dispel prudish notions about human waste. "In every society, the subject is taboo," said Mulkh Raj, the museum's chairman. "I think it's because the body organs used have sexual overtones."

Beginning with details of the first recorded sewer - a series of drainpipes over streams in the Indus River Valley about 2500 BC - the museum traces the history of toilets from the John of civilization. Among its highlights : sketches of medieval velvet chairs with holes in them and pots underneath, and the first known W.C., invented in 1596 by John Hatington for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I.

According to the Museum, the modern public convenience was not introduced until the French government in 1830 built the first toilet in Paris. By 1848, cholera out breaks in England, claiming hundreds of lives a day, fostered a sanitation revolution. And soon, toilets were a mandatory feature of modern construction.

English translation of a German article published in "Frankfuter Allegemeine" on Monday, the 23 March, 1992. FOLLOWERS OF GANDHI HELP "UNTOUCHABILITY" OF THE UNTOUCHABLES"

Indian "Bhangi" transports the excrement of his fellow beings in 93% houses in villages. There are no latrines there.
By Erhard Haubold

NEW DELHI, March 22 : They carry the excrement of their fellow-beings in big metal trays. Approximately 600,000 men and women earn their livelihood from this work. They are known as "Bhangis" and they occupy the lowest position in the caste system. They are the "untouchables". A cow is given more respect than they. At some places, they have to carry on their work at night, so that the aesthetic sentiments of their employers are not disturbed. One who has touched a "Bhangi" must immediately take bath. Earlier, the excrement cleaner was supposed to wear a small bell around his neck and stamp heavily the ground with a stick so that the people around him should know that the "Bhangi" is coming and everyone would make their children go inside their houses.

Earlier, the "Bhangis" did the menial job with their bare hands, but today they use either a broom or a small shovel. The Indian Government forbids the "human discrimination" since 1994-95. However, that cannot be possible as social problems cannot be solved with passing articles in the Constitution. Out of 4,000 cities, only 217 have a partly functional sewage systems. In 93% of the houses, there are no latrines. Out of 900 million Indians, about 700 million use fields along the railway lines and river banks for their natural call. One who arrives at New Delhi Airport during the morning hours would see a flock of people, often with a bottle of water in their hands, on their way to their morning ritual or on their way back from it. They wear the Brahminical string ("Janau") over their ear or worn under the clothes, so that it does not get dirty. The former Minister and the Maharajah of Kashmir, Karan Singh and the famous writer Mulk Raj Anand have described the Indian Capital as one of the most polluted places in the world. Seventeen Union States have decaying waste lying around.

Lately, 5,000 people living in slums have demonstrated in front of a police station in Ashok Vihar in North-West Delhi. the police had, on the request of the well-to-do citizens, forbidden the slum-dwellers from using the neighbouring park as toilets and built a wall to protect it from this. "Where shall we go for our daily ritual", the people complained. More than a half of the 9 million persons in the Capital live in slums where majority of garbage piles serve as toilets.

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, a Brahmin, as a child touched a "Bhangi" woman. then, not only his mother washed him from head to toe, but he also had to buy cowdung and drink water from the Ganga river for "spiritual cleaning". Today, Pathak is 48 years old and is promoter of sociology. He is also the leader of the Sulabh Movement, whose aim is to free the "Bhangis". Pathak and his other colleagues are convinced that the sewerage system as at present found in the West, will be too expensive for Indians and has not been considered suitable due to water scarcity.

Experiment with Biogas Plant : the "Sulabh" Movement builts latrines, which on the release of 2 litres of water makes the excrement flow into one of the two pits in the ground made of clay, brick or ceramic. If one of the pits is full and this lasts for approximately three years, then the excretament is moved to the second pit and the first one is closed. After approximately two years, it results in a dry, smelly mass which is collected on the sheets and finds good use as urea for the plants. The Sulabh Movement has already had experience for the biogas plant. Uptil now 6,000 Sulabh latrines have been constructed. That is a small number feasible during the last 20 years and Pathak already finds the scarcity of funds.

Cholera Epidemic : "We shall build 3 million latrines", says the sociologist, in cities, at bus-stops, railway stations and also at public places, such latrines with 20 to 100 pots and wash-basins". For private houses, the Sulabh equipment cost Rs. 2,000/- to Rs. 2,500/- (approximately 125-160 DM), of which one half is subsidised by the State and the rest can be financed by the Bank. With 200 million DM - a progressive country like Germany can construct double the number as in India every year - a mechanised factory can build about 1.25 million Sulabh latrines. And in view of recurrence of cholera epidemic every, year as also of fly plague, most of Delhi stinks; it is the question number one which politicians should have before them.

"Bhangis" have been in India since as early as 2000 B.C.", says Pathak. Villagers, princes and kings have used their houses equipped with toilets. The erratic rise in the demand was after the Mughal invasion. The Muslim conquerors brought their women who lived in purdah (veil) in women quarters and could not relieve themselves in the open. The slaves working as excrement cleaners in this conquered land were to be transported during the earlier wars from the representatives of the higher castes Kshatriya. After the retreat, the slaves - the dirty class - were not accepted by the warrior class. They formed their own caste "Bhangi". they received neither social recognition nor human acceptance", writes Pathak in his dissertation. Over hundreds of years, they have fallen socially and financially and they can neither rebel against the social sanctions nor leave the menial job.

The first to fight for them was Mahatma Gandhi. "Each one must seek his own freedom", wrote he in the Constitution of the Indian Congress Party at Calcutta in the year 1901 and he requested other freedom fighters to do the same. "The Mahatma set a good example", writes Pathak. Indira Gandhi learnt to fight for their freedom on her visit to Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram. She reported to Parliament - "I do not want to be born again. However, if it happens, then I want to be born in a family of the scheduled caste, so that I can help them and free them from their inhuman treatment, menial work." So after the Father of the Nation was assassinated, Gandhi's follower Pathak has till today freed 30,000 "Bhangis". Their children are given vocational training such as driving or cobbling which they can practise in a backward States like Bihar. And more and more bureaucrats in cities and villages, lawyers, doctors and journalists are each adopting a "Bhangi" family. thus, the social revolution will start, since it is hindered when the children take up jobs and vocations of their fathers and pick up shovel and bucket for collecting excrement.

NEW DELHI, May 7 (UNI) The United Nations Centre for Human Settlement has identified Sulabh International, a voluntary organisation, as one of the 55 global agencies commended to be employed in the programmes of the International year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH).

A Press release from Sulabh said thee IYSH programme included providing and improving shelter, drinking water, sanitation and waste disposal, upgradating infrastructure and services for the poor, like roads, public transport and low-cost sanitation.

Of the 55 agencies, Sulabh is the only voluntary organisation, the release added.

Sulabh specialises in providing sanitation through low-cost solutions and converts bucket latrines into pour flush systems which rule out hand cleaning of excreta.

Sulabh International, in the latest brochure of UNCHS (Habitat), has been mentioned as a premier organisation with special skill and know-low for providing adequate sanitation "through low-cost solutions under efficiently administered schemes supported by public authorities," Sulabh creates cleans environment by converting bucket latrines into pour-flush system which rules out hand cleaning excreta and, thus, abolishing scavenging which is also the trust area of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi's programme for rural construction.

Sulabh also maintains community latrines which operate independent of city sewerage system, already overburdened because more houses have been constructed than were originally planned unauthorised colonies can be provided Sulabh sanitary system which will not put pressure on the civic system. Since Sulabh also maintains these community complexes for as long as 30 years and more, civic authorities save on maintaining them. These are also being turned into growth centres which would provide many other facilities.

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, the man behind the Sulabhmovement and the liberator of scavengers, said today in a statement that Sulabh movement is catching up in the developing countries from where he is receiveing inquiries on the programmes. Many delegations from abroad recently visited Sulabh omplexes in the Capital and studied the system. Dr. Pathak is a widely travelled man and a leading environmentalist known all over the world.

Besides low-cost sanitation systems Sulabh has also developed technology to produce biogas from human excreta through digester which is served by Sulabh toilets to produce about 55 cm biogas a day. the gas is fed into the prime mover for generating electrical power for a 10 KVA generator. The system is working in Patna.

Turning shit into gold

KHUSHWANT SINGH
AN early morning train journey going out of any large city can be a nauseating experience. On both sides of the rail track are lined men with their backsides turned towards passing trains defecating in the open. Their logic is simple : if they can't see passing trains, they don't care if passengers in these trains see what they are doing. Why can't we provide latrines where people can evacuate their bowels in privacy? Another thing I have noticed is that there are no women among these day-light defecators. They are too modest to expose their hind parts to public gaze, and suffer agonies till it is dark enough for them to go out.

I am not sure if it was this kind of experience that red young Bindeshwar Pathak from Vaishali (Bihar) to thing of doing something about it. He came from a family of very modest means, lived with an uncle who ran a college chai shop while he was working for his Master's Degree and then a doctorate. Or perhaps it was the sight of bhangis (scavengers) carrying can full of strinking nightsoil on their heads which made his blood boil at the humiliation imposed on these unfortunate workers, numbering over 800,00. Why could not every home have lavatory and every street have a row of them for men and women? Was not there a way of making lavatories that would be self-cleaning and human excreta put to good use? Bindeshwar Pathak designed just such a latrine. Two litres of water sent human excreta into small pits where bacteria purified it, the gas it produced was piped to generate fire and electricity. And all within the means of the poorest of the poor householders. At first no one would like him seriously. He found an enthusiastic supporter in Sumitra Prasad who was a minister in the Bihar Government. She gave him the green signal. So began the Sulabh Shauchalaya Sansthan in Patna in 1970. Today it spans the entire length and breadth of the country with millions of Shauchalayas generating their own income, lighting homes and localities and providing them cheap cooking gas. Pathak got national recognition by the award of Padma Bhushan in 1991 and international recognition being given audience by the Pope and the award of Saint Francis Prize for environment in 1992. Since then Pathak has expanded his activities to provide training and employment to children of deprived scavengers families. His Institute in Mahavir Enclave near Palam airport trains boy and girls as car drivers, electricians, carpenters, typists, tailors, mechanics etc. In the same compound are many designs of Shauchalayas on display. It is well worth a visit - if only to realise the magnitude of the problem created by human waste and get the feeling that something can be, and is being done about it. Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak deserves the gratitude of the nation.