August 30, 2016
“It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it’s worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners’ house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders, and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.”
August 30, 2016
“But all over India one thing is common: beneath the castes are the outcastes, the polluted and the untouchable. They are untouchable because they handle human shit.”
August 30, 2016
“They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the Scheduled Castes, but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don’t stick to their caste jobs anymore. There is more intercaste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before, but the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India’s animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement.”
August 30, 2016
“A latrine is usually defined as a receptacle in the ground that holds human excreta, but dry latrines often don’t bother with receptacles. They usually consist of two bricks, placed squatting distance apart on flat ground. There is no pit. There may be a channel or gutter nearby, but that would be luxury. The public ones usually have no doors, no stalls, and no water. There are still up to 10 million dry latrines in India, and they probably only survive because Champaben and others are still prepared to clean them.”
August 30, 2016
“On paper, Champaben doesn’t exist, and on paper, she is as free as the next villager. Untouchability has been illegal in India since 1949, when it was abolished by means of Article 17 of the Constitution of India.”
August 30, 2016
“The women talk freely. They are chatty and assertive and pristine. I look at them and try to see the dirt on them and in them, but I can’t. They are elegant and beautiful even when they bend down to pick up the two pieces of cracked tin they use to scoop up the excrement; when they demonstrate how they sweep the filth into the basket; when they lift the basket high with arms glittering with bangles, with considerable grace. Their compound is dusty but not dirty, though they are not given soap by their employers—whom they refer to more accurately as their “owners”—and though they are not allowed to get water from the well without permission from an upper-caste villager. They offer me a tin beaker of water, and the water is yellow. “Look at it,” says Mukesh, an activist from a local Dalit organization called Navsarjan who has accompanied me. “Look at what they have to drink.” The beaker presents a quandary.”
August 30, 2016
“Mukesh has been to this village before. Plenty of well-meaning activists have been here before. “You come here all the time, you institute people,” says Gangaben. “And what do you do? Nothing.” Gangaben is the most indignant. She disappears into the house and returns with two chappatis—flatbreads—on a plate. Look at this, she says. This is what I was paid today. Scraps. Privately employed scavengers usually get paid 5 rupees (about ten cents) per month, per house. Municipal day wages are 30 rupees (less than a dollar) a day, but scavengers are often unpaid for months on end. Who will dare to stand up to their employer? When I ask Hansa to show me where she works, she refuses. No way. “My owners would skin me alive.” She is deadly serious, and deadliness is something she has to consider.”
August 30, 2016
“There are laws to protect Dalits, to criminalize untouchability, and to outlaw manual scavenging, but they are not enforced. Violence and abuse against Dalits is endemic and unceasing. ”
August 30, 2016
“A 2006 survey of 565 villages in eleven states found that Dalit children in 37.8 percent of government schools were forced to sit apart from other children during mealtimes. Part of that 37.8 percent is Hansa’s daughter, a pretty child who tells me she’s not allowed to sit with her school friends. When I ask Meena what she wants to do when she grows up, she puts her head in her hands.”
August 30, 2016
“Then they explained why. “We were told very categorically by the upper castes that our names were to be self-ridiculing. If any parent or grandparent chose a fair name of the child, we were instantly abused for having lost sight of our aukath (social and moral position).” They list their names. Jhamta, Kaloo, Gobar, Ghoodo. Spade, Black, Dung, Horse.”
August 30, 2016
“The director of a London sewage treatment works admitted to me that when he tells new acquaintances what his job is, “some people do move three feet backwards.”
August 30, 2016
“The Vishnu Purana, dating from the first to the third century BCE, instructs followers to defecate at least 150 feet from a source of water, and to urinate 15 feet away from habitation. The Buddhist text Vinaya Pitaka, a rulebook for monks, is expansive in its toilet provisions. Proper Buddhists should, among other things, not defecate in the toilet in order of seniority but of arrival; cough loudly upon arriving at the toilet (and if there is an occupant, he should cough in response); not defecate while chewing tooth-wood; nor grunt upon defecation; and not wipe oneself with a rough stick.”
August 30, 2016
“But they don’t expect comfort. They don’t expect anything. “Our caste is written on our forehead,” says Champaben. “Ours is low and yours is high. That’s the way it is.” A young girl named Dhurmisthu is less entranced by tradition. “The caste system has nothing to do with religion. It’s a conspiracy maintained by the upper castes. We think we’re equal, but they just see brooms in our hand.”
August 30, 2016
“Young urban Indians contend that caste is irrelevant now, because India’s huge metropolises act as a mixing bowl, diluting old traditions and backward thinking. What happens to Hansa and Gangaben, they will say, is a thing of the villages, of peasants, of tradition and history. They will point to successful Dalit lawyers, politicians, academics. The current chief justice is a Dalit. Plenty of politicians in India’s upper house are Dalit. Under India’s Scheduled Castes reservations system—which is controversial but widely implemented—Dalits benefit from positive discrimination in employment and university places. But they are still Dalits, and there is still caste. Surveys show that the majority of young Indians still expect to have an arranged marriage, and 40 percent won’t marry outside their own caste or state.”
August 30, 2016
“In fact, manual scavengers continue to be employed by municipal authorities, who use them to clean sewers, and by Indian Railways. Last year, the company declined to say when it could phase out the use of manual scavengers to clean its tracks. Until fully sealed flush latrines were installed on its trains in place of the current “open discharge” ones, scavengers were the cheapest cleaning option.”
August 30, 2016
“Sulabh’s headquarters consists of a pleasant campus near Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. The campus has green lawns that refresh after the yellow brown dust and chaos outside, and signs urging visitors to smile, please, because you’re in Sulabh now.
I have visited Sulabh twice, and each time the procedure was the same. First, assembly, held in a low hall near the kitchen that cooks with biogas, fermented from the excrement deposited in the Sulabh public toilet complex next door. To reach the meeting hall, you walk over those green lawns, which get their color from being irrigated with effluent from the same toilets, cleaned with sand filters and UV light. ”
August 30, 2016
“ There is a scene in Richard Attenborough’s biopic film where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing.
Gandhi also argued with everyone else. At the 1901 Congress Party convention, he told delegates it was a disgrace that manual scavengers were being used to clean the ”
August 30, 2016
“latrines. He asked delegates to clean their own latrines and when they did not, he publicly cleaned his own. The eradication of manual scavenging was a recurrent theme throughout Gandhi’s life. He called the practice “the shame of the nation.” He wrote, “Evacuation is as necessary as eating; and the best thing would be for everyone to dispose of his own waste.”
September 3, 2016
“Gandhi’s tactics of encouraging brotherly love across caste boundaries and urging Indians to clean their own latrines had failed miserably. The status quo was too convenient. Pathak decided a better solution was to provide an alternative technology. Scavengers’ jobs would never be surplus to India’s needs, not with a population of a billion excreting people. Perhaps the solution was to make scavengers unemployable by eradicating dry latrines. Not by knocking them down, but by providing a better latrine model that didn’t require humans to clean it but was cheap and easy. Most important, it had to be easy to keep nice. Given a choice between a smelly, dirty latrine and the street, even the most desperate might choose the latter. Pathak read WHO manuals about pit latrines, and developed his own version.”
September 3, 2016
“Sulabh’s concept of pay-per-use was not new—a similar government program had been tried and failed several years earlier. The business model was. Instead of funding toilets with government grants, Sulabh approached authorities and municipalities and suggested something different: if the authority paid for the cost of constructing the toilet and provided the land, Sulabh would run it for a set number of years and keep the profits. The business model was an attractive one to municipal authorities who, back then, could not be bothered with sanitation. “Before, no one wanted to know,” says Pathak. “In the beginning, we couldn’t find anyone willing to tender to construct toilets. The upper castes wouldn’t consider it. They wouldn’t even come to meetings. Now they fight for the tenders. We have blended social reform and economic gain.”
September 3, 2016
“Sulabh has innovated in other ways: some Sulabh toilets also house primary schools. Others have health clinics attached. As impressive an achievement as that is—as any traveler stuck waiting for an Indian train will appreciate—Pathak is proudest of the effects his business has had on scavengers. Sixty thousand have been “liberated” as a result of Pathak’s efforts. Some are given alternative employment as cleaners in Sulabh toilet blocks. Nonetheless, a Sulabh employee tells me that hierarchies still persist. Scavengers will always be the lowliest cleaners. “The caretakers will be Brahmins, because they’re the ones collecting the money.”
Notes From: Rose George. “The Big Necessity.” iBooks.
