The Toilet Man of India

He saw dignity where others saw only filth, inventing an affordable toilet that freed people from the degrading practice of cleaning human waste by hand.

Bindeshwar Pathak was born in 1943 in Bihar and trained as a sociologist. As a young man he came face to face with the plight of manual scavengers — people, mostly from marginalised castes, forced to clean human waste by hand, an inhuman practice he came to see as a wound on society.

In 1970 he founded Sulabh International, and developed a simple, affordable twin-pit pour-flush toilet that could work without expensive sewer systems. This innovation made it possible to build sanitation almost anywhere, and to move away from the need for anyone to carry waste by hand.

His organisation went on to build vast numbers of household and public toilets across India, alongside programmes to rehabilitate former manual scavengers and restore their standing and livelihoods with training, education and support.

For Pathak the mission was never only about sanitation, important as that was. It was about human dignity — insisting that no person should be condemned to degrading labour. Bindeshwar Pathak died in New Delhi on 15 August 2023 at the age of 80, remembered as a crusader who linked sanitation to the deeper cause of human rights.