India's new loos save lives

Lack of modern sanitation comes with a cost. Nearly 600,000 Indian children die each year of ailments linked to poor sanitation. The UN's World Development Report of 1993 ranked India slightly above sub-Saharan Africa in terms of infectious diseases.

Next to the toilet museum, Sulabh is putting its ideals to work in a public school, where about 400 lower-caste children receive the usual mix of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with vocation training in tailoring, electrician work, fashion design, computers, and audio-equipment and television repair. Through education and training, Sulabh claims to have "liberated" some 60,000 Balmikis from scavenging work. Nearly 55,000 of them are now "activists" in their communities, educating others about the need for proper sanitation.

And like any group of tinkering scientists, the men and women at Sulabh couldn't help improving the ancient toilet for modern times. Sulabh brings ingenuity to solving the sanitation problem, with the invention of a composting toilet with two separate pits.

"The whole idea is to save water," says Ramachandran. "Today, we're taking good water from the river and using it to flush toilets, which makes the water dirty. Then we use expensive treatment techniques before dumping it back into the river. Instead, why not treat it at the source?"

It takes 10 people two years to fill up one pit. Once a pit is filled up, the refuse is diverted to the second pit, allowing the full pit to slowly dry out and break down the human refuse into composted manure that is safe enough to use in agriculture and even household vegetable gardens.

By the end of two years, the manure is safe enough to handle.

Mr. Ramachandran grabs a few pieces of manure and - alarmingly - smells them. "After one and a half years, it's fertilizer, there no harm in it at all," he says, handing the manure to a visitor. "There's not even any smell," he adds. "Is there?" The visitor agrees there is not.

The tinkering doesn't end there. Sulabh has engineered systems to capture methane gas from their larger public toilets and use it for running generators and for cooking gas. Some of this technology has also been deployed by Sulabh staff in neighboring countries, such as Nepal. This year, Sulabh plans to take its two-pit toilet technology to that most devastated of countries, Afghanistan.

Back at the toilet museum, Mr. Kumar notes that India has not always had a sanitation problem. Back in 2500 BC, the heyday of the Indus Valley civilization, residents of cities like Harappa and Mohenjo Daro had access to public sewage systems that in many ways are better than those in modern India. And unlike other civilizations of the same time period, household toilets were not something reserved for the rich. Even poor and middle class Indians had toilets then.

Recapturing that egalitarian spirit will be a Herculean task, Kumar admits, one that is as difficult as changing the sanitation habits of far too many Indians. "The sad fact, sir, is that in rural areas, people prefer open defecation," says Kumar. "And the best way to solve that is education."

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