The school that empties its own toilets

Students and teachers at this Tamil Nadu school, which only has dry toilets, spend Gandhi Jayanti turning waste into soil

- Pankaj Mishra

Students and teachers at Pathashaala in Tamil Nadu empty a compost chamber on Gandhi Jayanti; (below) older students carry a sack of freshly harvested compost during the October 2 collection; and (top right) a handful of finished compost.

(BHAVEEN SAWLAN)

The compost is dark—brown at the edges, black in the centre, still damp from the monsoon night. When I dig my fingers in, it breaks and catches the first light like new topsoil.

As I lift out a tray of compost, Bharath Balaji Sathiyamoorthy, engineer-turned-teacher, walks over, points to the chamber I’m clearing, and says quietly “That one’s mine.” He thanks me and steps away.

Around us, students keep working: trays slide out, buckets scrape, a couple of voices compare colour and texture. The smell is sharp but not unpleasant—soil after rain. Small, regular mounds form behind the dorm. It looks like maintenance work. Here, it is the curriculum.

It is 2 October, Gandhi Jayanti. It’s one of the two mornings each year, 2 April and 2 October, when Pathashaala, the Krishnamurti Foundation India school in Chengalpattu district, 80km south of Chennai, opens its dry toilets and harvests the compost. Each chamber takes roughly six months to turn waste into soil.

Pathashaala is one of the few places in India where dry toilets have been used campus-wide for over a decade. Comparable efforts exist in Auroville (Puducherry) and in Ladakh, but this is arguably the longest-running successful effort. In fact, educator Sonam Wangchuk visited Pathashaala in 2020 to study its system for his own residential schools. Elsewhere, public or government deployments have struggled to sustain daily practice. Pathashaala has used no flush toilets since 2010; the system has held through fifteen years of student cohorts. Disclaimer: My daughter studies here.