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Humanure power

The next time you’re sitting on a toilet, do remember that it is a privilege, when in fact, it should be a right

In a TEDx talk about his work, Anoop Jain begins with a simple question to his audience: “Who among us here doesn’t poop?” Even as the audience laughs at the question, Anoop rattles off some numbers — 650 million people in India do not have access to a proper toilet; an estimated $10 billion are lost every year, due to the time employable adults spend in looking for a place to defecate; 100,000 tons of untreated human waste is left out in the open, everyday.
Anoop makes a simple point: He asks that the next time you’re sitting on a toilet, do remember that it is a privilege, when in fact, it should be a right. It is to address this gap between privilege and right that Anoop has been working with Humanure Power, an NGO, tackling the problem of rural sanitation in Bihar by building community toilets.
For his efforts through Humanure, Anoop was recently presented with the Waislitz Global Citizen Award, and US$100,000.
“Winning the award is a tremendous boost to our confidence. It means that others believe in the work we are doing just as much as we do,” says Anoop, adding that he is merely a messenger who accepted the award on behalf of the communities Humanure works with in Bihar.
Anoop, who studied environmental engineering at Northwestern University, first became interested in the problem of rural sanitation when he quit a cushy job in the US to help set up a community kitchen in McLeod Ganj in 2010 (he had earlier taught English to Tibetan refugees here in 2006).
He met with Chandan Kumar (currently, the India co-director for Humanure), who helmed a tutoring programme called Deep Jyoti in Bihar. Anoop offered his help in designing a mid-day meal plan for the children attending Chandan’s tutoring programme. “We understood how kids were often suffering from stunted growth, anemia, and intestinal worms. Talking to doctors, however, we came to realise that the underlying cause of these diseases wasn’t necessarily poor or unhygienic food. Rather, it was the contamination caused by outdoor defecation. Talking to community members, we got a similar story — that families were really struggling due to a lack of toilets. That’s when we decided we want to build toilets,” Anoop recounts.
With the help of $30,000 that they won through a Dell Social Innovation Challenge in 2012, Anoop and the Humanure team launched their pilot project in July this year. Eight toilets were constructed each for men and women, and these now average about 700 users a day. The waste from these free-to-use toilets is collected in a biogas tank. When the waste decomposes, the methane gas so produced is used to power a generator and produce electricity. The electricity is then used to power water filtration systems. Anoop explains, “This technology exists and is proven. We are just connecting it in ways that it hasn’t been connected in the past.”
For Anoop, who counts Dr Paul Farmer — a crusader for health equity in marginalised communities around the world — among his heroes, the work he does with Humanure “boils down to a few simple things: First, my parents instilled some very important values in me from an early age. They never said, ‘You must dedicate your life to service’. But they taught me about respect and humility. They never let me forget how fortunate I have been to live the life I do. Second, I got to a point in my life where I understood that people are being victimised by injustice all around me. To understand that and not act is to be complicit in that oppression. This isn’t about sympathising with someone and wanting to make him/her feel better for a moment or two. This work, this journey, is about radically disrupting the systems and structures that perpetuate these injustices. It is about working alongside communities to empower them to become the protagonists in affecting change for themselves.”

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