A Clean Sweep

How a simple two-pit toilet system changed the landscape of household sanitation and the fates of manual scavengers nationwide

- Anu Prabhakar

Growing up, we had a great big house, which had everything,” recalls Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the NGO Sulabh International. “Everything, that is, except a toilet. So, at about four a.m. everyday, I would hear my mother, aunt, grandmother, and sisters going out in the dark to relieve themselves.” Being born to an upper caste Brahmin family in 1943 granted one a number of social privileges, but open defecation was a common practice, and not even the elite were exempt. “Back then, there was no infrastructure that people could adopt for better sanitation,” he says of his home village Rampur Baghel in Bihar’s Vaishali district. “Septic tanks were costly and only very few towns even had a sewage network.”

Sanitation systems at the time (one that persists in many underdeveloped parts of India even today) were rudimentary, with convenience, comfort or dignity reserved only for those among the higher classes, such as zamindars. They used bucket toilets and dry latrines but these had to be regularly cleaned—a task typically passed on to people from the ‘lower’ caste, who were deemed ‘untouchable’. People from this marginalized group had to rely on the open outdoors for their own needs, regardless of weather or peril.