TIRUCHY: Marachi Subburaman was all smiles on Monday night when list of this year’s Padma awardees was announced. The 71-year-old social worker’s efforts in helping reform sanitation in rural areas had received a national recognition.
Subburaman’s NGO, Society for Community Organisation and Peoples Education (SCOPE), has focused on improving sanitation in rural India from 1986.
Born in Inungur Pudupatti village in Kulithalai, Subburaman, the first graduate from his village, says he saw the struggles faced by villagers only when he started working. The turning point, he says, came in 1976. Fresh into his first job at the Village Reconstruction Organisation, Subburaman found himself having to travel to different villages to study them before constructing houses.
Deputed to Madagam village in Pudukkottai, he was shocked to find that a tank near which he was directed to relieve himself was being used for all purposes. When he made further enquiries, he was horrified to learn that the water he’d consumed the previous night came from the very same tank. “I immediately dug a pit in the village, bought a toilet pan for Rs 25 and fit it in the pit. That ‘toilet’ is still standing in that village,” he says.
Despite this, SCOPE was initially started with an intention to help young widows and women. The first few years were focused on training women in tailoring, mat weaving and other income-generating activities. It even constructed houses for women with the help of NABARD.
“After two or three years, we conducted a detailed study about how the income was being used. We realised that a lot of their income went in hospital expenditure due to infections caused by contaminated drinking water and improper sanitation. That’s when we shifted our focus to sanitation and drinking water,” says Subburaman.
In Musiri, the groundwater level is very high, which is why normal toilet pits weren’t working properly. That’s when Subburaman thought of ECOSAN toilets (Ecological sanitation), which are dry toilets, with no flushes and septic tanks. The toilets, built above the ground, have different chambers for urine and faeces. Each outlet connects to different pits at the bottom. This reduces the wastage of water too, says Subburaman. The excreta becomes compost, which is excellent for the soil, he explains.
Subburaman strongly believes that we must change first before asking others to change. Keeping with that, he personally tests every new form of toilet before constructing it in any village. The septuagenarian uses an ECOSAN toilet at his house.
“We first tried this model at our training centre at Thaneerpandal village in Musiri. We tested it for two years before rolling it out. We built the first ECOSAN community toilet in Musiri in 2005. These are also called Urine Diversion Toilets. We then became the resource centre for ECOSAN in the country,” says Subburaman.
The main thing, he explains, is that you cannot simply build a toilet anywhere. “A location-specific toilet is very important. The solution to any problem should not lead to a new problem,” he says.
He views these changes in sanitation as his biggest achievement. SCOPE is also the recipient of the best NGO Award for clean villages in 2005 and the Nirmal Gram Puraskar Award for Best NGO in Sanitation in 2006.