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It was 2003, and Ms. Chaumar was on her way to work then Bindeshwar Pathak stopped her. She recalls being amazed that a "becomingly dressed" man would at the very season speak with someone approve her: a manual scavenger. As such, it was her job to clean human waste, by hand, from homes that lack flushing toilets in this dusty village in the state of Rajasthan.

Usually, neighbors crossed the street when they by-word her future with the tools of her trade: a metal pan and convey by electric telegraph encounter. And even when she had finished her gut-churning work and scrubbed her body clean, she was treated as a outcast.

But Dr. Pathak asked her why she covered her face with her shawl and why she seemed abashed to theme to him. At the time, Chaumar had no exemplar she was speaking to the servant whose mission it was to end of the hand scavenging and who would eventually change her life.

Pathak founded an organization called Sulabh in 1970 to eradicate the practice by replacing unplumbed toilets with affordable flush ones, and by giving scavengers training for other jobs.

"Shopkeepers would drop the rice to me – they wouldn't touch me," Chaumar remembers, losing her smile for a moment. "And they made me put my money into disgrace, at a distance from them. They threw water besides it before taking it."

Today, she earns a living selling homemade pickles and embroidered cloths.

Manual scavenging was banned in India in 1993, by a law that forbids the erection of exsiccate toilets and requires existing ones to be destroyed. But in India, such laws tend to be implemented slowly. There are fancy to be separate hundred thousand manual scavengers still working; a recent report found there were over 1,000 in Delhi alone.

Sulabh has built 1.2 million affordable hygienic toilets throughout India and helped 60,000 former manual scavengers move into other jobs.

All those jobs are held by members of the Valmiki community, a substratum of the Dalit caste – formerly known as untouchable – at the bottom of the ancient Hindu caste system. The term untouchable – in a line through, theoretically, the taint attached to it – was made illegal by India's Constitution in 1950.

In Alwar, in 2003, Pathak set up a retraining program on account of the town's manual scavengers which has given more than 50 women vocational training. The center, where women learn to read and set down in writing, make clothes, and train in the same proportion that beauticians, is housed in a prosperous area of Alwar.

"At first they felt uncomfortable coming here, but we wanted to give them a dissimilar perspective," says Suman Chahar, who runs the center.

In one room, Lalita Nanda is making wicks for oil lamps in Hindu temples. The priests who buy them did not let Lalita into the temple until recently, she says, smiling.

One of the first things Pathak did with Alwar's scavengers was usher them into the town's biggest Hindu temple. He furthermore took a dispose out to dinner at the Maurya Sheraton, a five-star hotel in Delhi.

The manager was for a like reason appalled he tried to stop the women entering. Pathak promised to pay for anything that was broken or stolen; nothing, of course, was; and as the party left, the manager apologized to them.

Sulabh's transformation of manual scavengers would not be in posse without the other part of its work, the development of cheap hygienic toilet technology.

"The dressing-table is a tool of social change," declares Pathak, who defies the stereotype of the scruffy Gandhian activist dressed in rough-spun cotton. He is wearing, instead, a starched frosty pajama suit with a smart jacket; his hair is dyed black, and he wears a fine gold ring.

Born into a household of Brahmins – the highest of all the castes - in a town in Bihar, Pathak remembers, as a little boy, being intrigued by the conception that the ordinary-looking woman who sold kitchen utensils to his family could exist "untouchable."

"So I touched her," he says, "Just to see. And my grandmamma made me carouse a olla-podrida of overawe urine, cow dung, and Ganges water." That combination is meant with respect to the reason that both cleanser and punishment.

Later, Pathak joined a committee established to celebrate the centennial of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. During this period he was struck by what Mr. Gandhi had said about scavengers: "I may not be born again, but if it happens I will like to be born into a family of scavengers, in the same state that I may relieve them of the inhuman, unhealthy, and hateful practice of carrying death soil."

Curious, Pathak went to live in a community of scavengers for three months. At this point, he says, he was not at the same time inspired by their cause. But two experiences changed this.

The first, he says, was when he saw a newly married girl being forced by her mother-in-law to according human waste by hand. "I can't describe how horrifying her crying was," he says. The second was at the time that he saw a small boy being attacked by means of a rescript. People rushed to save him, on the other hand which time someone cried out that he came from the Valamiki caste, they left him, and he was killed.

"These things still happen," says Pathak. "But we have everything we require to change things. It is so, so frank, if rabble but have the resoluteness."