By Doreen Fiedler
Usha Dhamuniya is a Dalit, one of India’s millions of “untouchables” living at the bottom of a caste system that lives on in the world’s largest democracy, although officially long ago abolished.
“We are people, not animals,” says the 20-year-old from the town of Tonk in the northern state of Rajasthan. From the age of 11, Dhamuniya was forced to clean toilets, assisting her mother.
“I tried to go to school, but the other children bullied me,” she says. Even at school she was constantly compelled to clean the lavatories.
Today this young woman has left that life behind and earns her money by sewing and embroidering. She is also going to high school and aims to become a teacher.
Things changed for her after the non-profit organisation Sulabh began working in Tonk. Sulabh, which provides social services, not only offered the Dalits an education but also introduced a simple toilet system.
“To free the untouchables from their situation you don’t need a miracle, but rather a flush toilet,” says Sulabh founder Bindeshwar Pathak.
Latrines without water flushing them are still common in India, even though “manual scavenging” — cleaning such latrines by hand — has technically been illegal since 1993.
“The excrement falls from the toilet into a chamber. The houses have an opening into the chamber so that we can clean the muck out from outside,” Rajni Athwal says. She worked using scrapers, brooms and even with her bare hands.
“We carried the buckets away on our heads. When it rained it used to drip onto us,” says the 30-year-old Dalit from the city of Alwar, also in Rajasthan.
The stigma attached to their work oppressed them as much as the work itself. “People didn’t pay the money into our hands but threw it on the ground in front of us instead,” she says.
Because they were seen as dirty they were not allowed to enter temples or pick out their own vegetables at traders’ stalls.
Now at last after years of education and campaigning, these women are part of society. “People say, now you are called madam,” Athwal says. People who previously would have had nothing to do with them now buy conserves and bread from them.
But this is by no means the case throughout India. There are still around 50,000 manual scavengers at work in the country, according to Pathak, although this is well down from the figure of 3.5mn some 50 years ago, according to the official census.
Sulabh’s work on toilets has helped put the issue on the agenda in India, he says. Pathak, a member of the highest caste of the Brahmins, has been campaigning for human rights and better sanitary facilities for 40 years now.
His organisation operates 8,000 public toilets and has sold 1.3mn toilets to private homes, he says with some pride. These toilets do not need to be connected to a sewage system and comprise a separate room and two tanks set in the ground.
They are constructed by the owners themselves — from brick in Punjab, from stone in Rajasthan, from wood in Assam and from mud in West Bengal. “We use whatever is locally available,” Pathak says.
The cheapest model — made of bamboo and jute sacking — costs $15, and the most expensive $1,000. Just one litre of water is needed for each visit to the toilet, and the latrines last for 40 years.
Dhamuniya says that when she was cleaning out the latrines in the old style she always asked the almighty why she had been born into her caste and begged to come back in another caste the next time she was born.
“I don’t think that any more. Now I don’t mind,” she says. “I’m proud of my caste.” – DPA