Bindeshwar Pathak

Bindeshwar Pathak (1943-2023) was a sociologist from Hajipur in Bihar who spent his working life trying to end manual scavenging in India, and founded Sulabh International in 1970 to do it. He graduated in sociology from Banaras Hindu University in 1964 and later took a master's degree and a doctorate at the University of Patna.

His commitment dates from 1968, when he joined the Bhangi-Mukti, or scavengers' liberation, cell of the Bihar Gandhi Centenary Celebrations Committee. For his doctoral research he travelled across India living with scavenger families, and concluded that the practice was not only cruel to those doing it but corrosive to Indian society as a whole. His response was technical rather than purely political: he judged that scavenging persisted because the alternative sanitation available was either unaffordable or unavailable, and set out to design a household toilet that did not require anyone to carry away waste. The twin-pit pour-flush latrine he developed could be built cheaply and maintained without human handling of excreta, and Sulabh went on to build and operate public toilet blocks across the country. He later linked Sulabh toilets to fermentation plants that convert waste to biogas, a design that also yields odourless effluent rich in phosphorus usable as manure, and which has since been adopted in other developing countries. Sulabh's remit widened to human rights work, environmental sanitation, waste management and social reform through education, drawing on some 50,000 volunteers.

His work was recognised at home and abroad. Pathak received the Padma Bhushan in 1991 and, posthumously, the Padma Vibhushan in 2024. Other honours include a place on the United Nations Environment Programme's Global 500 Roll of Honour in 2003, the Stockholm Water Prize in 2009, the Dubai International Award for Best Practices, the Energy Globe Award, the Legend of Planet award presented at the French Senate in 2013, the Nikkei Asia Prize for culture and community in 2018, and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for 2017. In April 2016 the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, declared 14 April Bindeshwar Pathak Day. He served as brand ambassador for the Indian Railways' Swachh Rail mission and wrote several books, of which The Road to Freedom is the best known. He died in New Delhi on 15 August 2023.[2]