Swapnil Chaturvedi refers to himself as the Chief Toilet Cleaner, and is known as “Poop Guy” in the community of Pune, India. Officially, he’s the founder of Samagra Sanitation, a company providing sanitation services to the urban poor. After a decade in the United States, he returned to India with his young family to improve the sanitation facilities where almost 626 million of the 1.2 billion population do not have access to toilets. In this video from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he explains his main motivation:
“…there is only one reason: for a woman’s dignity. It goes back to me being a father of a girl child… when I look at my daughter and I think about her future, this is the kind of service I would like her to have. As kids become adults, they take with them all sorts of hygiene habits so that they don’t have these issues and that is the only way.
We can live without Facebook, we can live without a smartphone, but we cannot live without relieving ourselves. It’s a daily natural activity. Then why such a taboo around it? We should talk about it openly and we should do something about it.”
Related watching: the Japanese volunteers that clean public toilets and more innovation.
via @MelindaGates.
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