See Inside a Toilet Museum

The toilet is my dream. The toilet is my life.

I had been working in the field of sanitation at the time, more than three decades. So I thought, "Why not start a museum of toilets?"

And this toilet, the oldest in civilization, 5,500 years old. Now this is the throne of Louis XIV. And this is a toilet used by Mahatma Gandhi.

I joined a society to celebrate the birth centenary of Mahatma Gandhi. And there my general secretary asked me to restore the human rights and dignity of Untouchables.

This class of society, the Untouchables, they can touch dogs, but they can't touch human beings. They have been kept totally separated from the society.

So I said, "Sir, I am a Brahmin by caste." I touched a lady Untouchable and for that matter, my grandmother forced me to swallow cow dung and drink cow urine and Ganga water to purify me.

I started dreaming about toilets, sanitation, Untouchables. I started living with them, eating with them. And for that matter, I was ostracized by the Brahmin society. My father was very sad. My father-in-law was very angry with me, and he used to say “I don’t want to see your face.”

I grew up in Peer, near Bharatpur. I used to do the work of manual scavenging when I was seven years old. I would get fever, vomiting, stomach ache, dizziness. When I would come back from manual scavenging I wouldn't feel like eating anything. I mean, I would just crash as soon as I got home. I would keep getting images of the excrement. But what could I do? I was desperate so I had to do that work.

I used to want to play with the children of the other castes. So they used to grab their children and tell me, "You should sit far away. Why are you sitting here? We will have to bathe our kids." We used to feel very hurt. We are also human, they are also human. But no one understood that. We used to feel very hurt then.

I had to find out a technology. A toilet, tool of social change. The cost, it's affordable. The construction, the maintenance. Water requirement, just one liter of water to flush. It is a concept, a thought process of solving the problems of society.

Sulabh Public School was started with a purpose that Untouchables' children should also be taught so that they can come into the mainstream of society. The unique feature of this school is 60% of the students are from the Untouchables community, and 40% from other communities. And that is helping to remove the differences among the upper castes and the lower castes in India.