With an aim to further improve social streamlining, well known social reformer and mentor of Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement, Dr Bindeshwar Pathak has devised a novel experiment, in which people will have the freedom to choose their own caste, as they have the freedom to change their religion.
While delivering an online lecture, Pathak recounted his pathbreaking initiatives through which the age old practice of casteism and inequality have been checked in recent years.
The theme of webinar was “Earlier Human Scavengers Now Brahmins: A Social Upgradation Programme to Choose One’s own caste”. Several scholars and liberated “Untouchable ladies “ exchanged their experiences .
Pathak said he conducted this experiment in the two towns of Rajasthan—Alwar and Tonk—with the women who earlier worked as manual scavengers. He took these women out of the subhuman work of cleaning human excreta and provided them the opportunity to read and write.
To empower and equip them with alternative employment, Dr Pathak set up a Vocational Training Centre named ‘Nai Disha’ in Alwar and Tonk, where the formerly human scavengers were given basic education and trained in trades such as tailoring clothes, carpet-making, namada handicraft, making pickles and papad, facials and beauty enhancement, etc.
The women, who were earlier, treated worse than dogs, discarded as ‘untouchables’, whose even shadows were to be avoided, now successfully sell their eatables in those houses where they earlier worked as manual scavengers.