"It's ironic," says Suman Chahar, an honourary adviser to the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation that Dr Pathak founded in 1970. The people who treated these women as untouchables now offer them a chair when they visit their homes as beauticians, she adds.
Chaumar has been elected president of the Sulabh Sanitation Mission Foundation with the mission of disseminating awareness about sanitation and motivating others to join the movement.
Nai Disha, a Sulabh initiative, currently houses 56 women who work 9 am to 4 pm and take home a monthly salary of Rs 2,000. The first batch (that visited New York last month) arrived in 2003; the second batch of 28 women joined two years ago.
Before arriving in New York, the women met President Pratibha Patil, who was moved by a poem 27-year-old Lakshmi Nanda narrated about her emancipation. Patil gave her Rs 500 as reward.
Nanda, who worked with her mother cleaning streets, got married at age 18; her mother-in-law asked her to carry human waste. "I protested, but my mother-in-law said she was doing it as well and I had to join her," she says. One day, Nanda was at work at Mahal Chowk, Alwar, when a car stopped and Dr Pathak stepped out, wanting to talk to her.
"I was a bit taken aback; why would he want to talk to me?" Nanda says. She called her friends, and they went together to talk to Dr Pathak. He asked her why she was in such a demeaning profession; she said no one would give her another job. She was then making between Rs 400 and Rs 500. Dr Pathak asked her to join Nai Disha.
Image: Dr Bindeshwar Pathak with members of Sulabh International at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
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