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Areas of Major Initiative

Institutions are created to carry on missions, faith and ideas. Christianity is a faith; Church is an institution. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Marxism Capitalism etc. are missions or faith and they have separate organisations to carry out their objectives. Institutions are built with bricks and mortars which age and decline with time. But faith and ideas don't. TheMarxist State in the former Soviet Union declined, but Marxism remains a concept even today. The Mahabharat is a 5,000-year-old story, containing the essential Indian philosophy,faith and ideas and it still continues to be the source of Indian culture. Ideas are enduring, permanent and indestructible and remain in the air when everything else is lost and forgotten.

Similarly, the Sulabh Sanitation Movement is a mission and the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation is an institution to implement its programmes and objectives. Since Sulabh's objectives are many, needing different kinds of approach, so different kinds of allied organisations have been set up, with experts heading them. However, there is a co-ordination at the apex level to ensure that their working is congruent with its objectives. The Sulabh movement being a combination of "hardware" (technology) and "software" (education, etc.) components, engineers and social scientists work together, firm in the belief that technology only facilitates change; working as a

means to provide good life and create a just social order. But its role has to be finally integrated with the holistic objectives. Hence, the complex – although well-defined – concept of the Sulabh movement is evident in the institutional spread of Sulabh International which is the country's largest NGO having a pan-India network. It is, therefore, necessary to know its comprehensive institutional spread to fully comprehend the "mission and faith" of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement.

The Sulabh International Social Service Organisation is the leading non-profit making outfit, working to promote sanitation and prevent environmental pollution which are critical components of a healthy and productive society. The growing population and the consequent strain on shrinking resources have created slums, violence, houselessness and human miseries which are evident among the people living on the edge. The growing urbanisation has also caused serious shortages of houses, forcing people to live in shanty colonies without toilet facilities. Beginning from a small town in Bihar, Sulabh now works virtually all over the country with the help of a large workforce of over 50,000 committed social volunteers, including administrators, management experts, engineers, architects, sociologists, scientists, mediapersons, etc.

It is now an established fact that most diseases are caused by bad sanitation. People build houses but not toilets, indicating skewed attitudinal and cultural preferences. Official agencies are sinners no less. They also do not lay sufficient stress on sanitation, most specially toilet facilities, in buildings. The snag in sanitation programmes is also technological. The sewerage system is very costly and, hence, not sustainable. There is neither enough water in rivers to carry city effluents, nor enough money to set up sewage treatmentplants. Even France is able to treat only 40 per cent of Paris sewage; the remaining waste flows into the Sein river, untreated.

The rapid deterioration in ecological balance, population explosion, growing urbanisation and industrialisation, destruction of forests and the consequent soil erosion are potential threats to human civilisation. In Third World countries, like India, yet another major source of environmental pollution is the absence of hygienic and safe human waste disposal systems.

Out of 6.31 billion (base year 2003) people living on the planet Earth, about 2.6 billion are not having access to safe and hygienic sanitation facilities. In India alone, out of 1000 million people, more than 630 million either use dry latrines, manually cleaned by scavengers, or they use the surrounding area for open-air defecation. Due to non-availability of toilets, especialy in rural areas, women cannot defecate in privacy with dignity. They go to open areas either before sunrise or after sunset which is not always safe for them either. It also causes many health problems In India alone, nearly 1.9 million children die each year of diseases like dysentery, hookworm or cholera. Of all the diseases, diarrhoea claims the highest number of lives in the country. This staggering mortality rate is due to lack of safe human waste disposal system. Hence, sanitation engineers, social scientists, planners and administrators have been searching for an affordable, safe, scavenging-free and hygienic system of human waste disposal which could be adopted on a mass–scale. The Sulabh Founder, Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak has finally succeeded in developing one such technology which promises to change the sanitation scenario in Third World countries.

Liberation Of Scavengers

Sulabh aims at restoring human rights and dignity to scavengers, ensuring their social integration, and poverty–alleviation, on the one hand, and the prevention of environmental pollution and promotion of sanitation, health and hygiene, on the other. During the past 30 years, Sulabh has succeeded in liberating a large number of scavengers from the demeaning practice of physically cleaning and carrying human waste, rehabilitating them in other professions, setting up about 1.3 million scavenging-free pour-flush toilets with bathing facilities. The Point 11A in the Government of India’s 20-Point Programme of 1986 relates to ‘Justice to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’. This clause was inserted in the 20-Point Programme by the then Prime Minister, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, on the persuasion of the Sulabh Founder. Under this programme, a large-scale toilet conversion and construction programme was launched in 1986 when cholera broke out in Delhi. Later, this plan was expanded into a national plan of sanitation and health to cover the entire country.

Objectives In Brief

• Liberate and rehabilitate scavengers.
• Social upgradation of scavangers.
• Promote indigenous technologies.
• Harness non-conventional energy sources from human waste and save fuel and forests.
• Educate people not to defecate in the open and prevent environmental pollution.
• Procure manure from Sulabh toilets and use it to raise farm productivity.
• Motivate people to get bucket privies converted into Sulabh toilets and set up toilets in their houses.
• Build community toilets with bathing, washing, urinal facilities on pay-and-use basis at public places.
• Promote vocational training and primary healthcare.
• Create new jobs by training change-agents for integrated rural development.
• Promote consultancy, research and development in technical and social fields.
• Promote awareness through mass communication