DR PATHAK’S BIOGAS PLANTS GIVE DIGNITY TO UNTOUCHABLES

Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of Sulabh International, has been conferred this year’s Energy Globe Award. Dr. Pathak is the leader of a national crusade for restoration of human rights and dignity to millions of scavengers traditionally known as untouchables by providing safe and hygienic human waste disposal system. This is a multipronged effort to bringing scavengers into the mainstream of national life and has taken the shape of a movement for social justice. He is now an internationally acclaim medical expert on sanitation and has developed and implemented on pan-Indian scale a low cost and appropriate toilet technolgy recommended by UN bodies for about three billion people across the globe.

The widespread phenomenon of open defecation remains grim even after 50 years of independence. Especially women have to suffer a lot due to non-availability of toilets. Even today 110 million Indian houses have no toilets and 10 million Indian houses have bucket toilets causing filth and disease. The situation is so appalling that about half million children die every year due to dehydration caused by open defecation.


Dr. Pathak is probably the first person in the world who has promoted on a massive scale, the idea of obtaining biogas from human excreta collected in large-sized public toilets used by 2000n to 5000 persons a day. It has been amply demonstrated by him that in the absence of sewerage facility, the best option for human waste disposal to be used in conjunction with large public toilets, is the biogas plant. It has the added advantage of being a source of renewable energy which is lacking in the septic tank system. Another first to Dr. Pathak’s credit is the granulated organic manure obtained from the dried sludge of biogas plants.


After Gandhi, Dr Pathak is the man who has championed sanitation and upliftment of the untouchables. For the last three decades Pathak has been working relentlessly to keep the ecosystem clean and bring the marginalized sections of the society in the mainstream. He has given a new dimension to the Gandhian movement and broad-based his principled fight against all kinds of discrimination. He knew that slogans alone will not help and hence developed a technology which has become a credible alternative to toilets.


Courtesy Maharashtra Herald, December 20, 2006