Bindeshwar Pathak

Bindeshwar Pathak was born into a Brahmin family in rural Bihar and studied sociology, becoming interested in the practice of manual scavenging, in which people from the lowest castes cleared human waste from bucket latrines by hand, often for a lifetime, with no way out of the work or the stigma attached to it.

In 1970 he founded Sulabh International and designed a low-cost, two-pit pour-flush toilet that could be built without a sewer connection and did not need to be emptied by hand, since waste composted safely in one pit while the other was used. Sulabh installed millions of these across India, along with public pay-and-use toilet complexes in cities that generated income to sustain themselves, and ran vocational training and schooling programmes specifically for former manual scavengers and their children, aiming to break a form of hereditary bondage rather than simply provide sanitation.

Pathak became known as the "Toilet Man of India" long before sanitation became a national political priority, and his campaigning helped shape the government's later Clean India Mission. He received the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian honour, and the Stockholm Water Prize. He died in New Delhi in August 2023, still chairing the organisation he had built from a single idea about a bucket latrine.