The work of sanitation ambassador Dr Pathak - A win for all Indians

Forty years of devotion to the environmental sanitation sector has earned Dr Bindeswar Pathak the enviable Stockholm Water Prize for 2009, presented to a personality whose work has impacted positively on lives. Dr Pathak’s achievement is a win for all Indians as by his sheer intervention, more than ten million Indians now have access to public places of convenience daily. Hitherto, most men, women and children had to defecate in the open, which came with its own environmental problems.

Of even greater achievement is the fight he won for young women who were enslaved to serve as scavengers cleaning bucket toilets manually. The plight of the scavengers, mostly women, was so dire that it became a burden for Dr Pathak, establishing the Sulabh International Social Service Organization as a solution to end the inhuman activity.

“The human scavengers were treated as untouchables and they were hated, humiliated and insulted by the people for whom they used to work, the untouchables caste died as an untouchable”, he said.

Speaking to Water Cube TV at the World Water Week in Stockholm, Dr Pathak recounted the shabby treatment that the scavengers were subjected to and his desire to reverse the trend.

Establishing the Sulabh is aimed at addressing three key problems Dr Sulabh identified. These are: the open defecation, the manual cleaning of toilets by scavengers and providing adequate toilets for the populous India.

“To stop defacation in the open and to end the practice of manual cleaning of human excreta by scavengers, a technology was needed. Ideas have to change the world”, he said.

The intervention

Dr Pathak intervened with a breakthrough technology, the Sulabh Shauchalaya twin pit, pour-flush toilet system which is currently being used in more than 1.2 million residences and buildings built by Sulabh.

The United Nations (UN) Habitat and Centre for Human Settlements has declared the technology a Global Best Practice.

The Sulabh public toilets and bath facilities are located at some 7,500 sites serving more than 10 million people daily.
Women and children use the Sulabh toilets and bath for free whilst men pay one dollar to use them for a whole month.

Up close with Dr Pathak

Born to Brahmin family in 1943 and raised in the India state of Bihar, Dr Pathak attended Patna University where he earned an M.A. in Sociology, an M.A. in English, a Ph.D. in ‘Liberation of Scavengers through low cost sanitation” and a Doctorate of Literature in “Eradication of Scavenging and environmental sanitation in India: a sociology study”.

Dr Pathak first came to understand the plight of scavengers in 1968 when he joined the Bhangi Mukti (Scavengers liberation) Cell of the Bihar Ghadhi Centenary Celebrations Committee.

During that time, he travelled throughout India, living with scavenger families as part of his Ph.D. research. Drawing on that experience, he resolved to take action, not only out of sympathy for the scavengers but also in the belief that scavenging is a dehumanizing practice that would ultimately have a destructive impact on modern India society.

One would have thought that Dr Pathak will hold tightly to the Sulabh technology because of the global recognition and respect it had accorded him, but no: “once a teacher, always a teacher”, he said.

“I have always desired to be a teacher and I am willing to share this technology with anyone who so desires to learn. It is also not patented so again, anybody can also reproduce”, he said.

Harriette Bentil, e-mail