This story caught my eye on BBC news. In India the caste system allows for some very strange circumstances to come about. I have often thought that without this system, the country would grind to a halt. Although I strongly disagree with being born into castes, and think that the whole idea is outrageous, there are many jobs that would not get done without it. It seems that it takes a certain acceptance of fate to be the person who manually shovels turds out of toilets. There are apparently 340,000 women who perform this task daily, they are known as ’scavengers’ and are part of the untouchable caste (Dalit). The women move from one house to another, performing the demeaning task of cleaning human excrement using their bare hands to smpty the toilets. This has to be carried for long distances to be disposed off, and they often carry it on their heads.
Mission Sanitation is an NGO that is working to help these women. they just put on a fashion show in New York that had some of them modeling and included many dresses that had been worked on by them. A group of Indian women, rescued by the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation from the degrading task of manually cleaning toilets, joined leading fashion models on the catwalk before representatives from more than 150 countries at UN Headquarters in New York, USA. The ceremony was especially poignant for Usha Chomar, because she was unofficially crowned as princess of sanitation workers.
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