Toilet Training

London may have the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, but have you ever dreamt of spending your holidays at a museum entirely dedicated to toilets? Of course you have. We all have. It’s perfectly natural.

Isn’t it?

Anyway, seek no further: the place you are looking for is located in Delhi. The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets is a strange place to spend a day, but it also has a lot to teach the world about sanitation and development. There’s a lot more to this place than kitsch value or prurient, scatological humour.

I arrived early in the day to find that I was the only visitor. Admittedly, it was raining heavily – but I began to worry that perhaps the toilet museum wasn’t the must-see visitor’s attraction I’d been led to believe it was. Fortunately, the museum’s curator was on hand to assure me that it was just the rain keeping the punters away. I glanced at the barrels of dried poo behind him and nodded in agreement.

The museum itself is well-maintained and the curator took the time to give me a personalised guided tour. They have a staggeringly varied collection of toilets from around the world, as well as displays and diagrams about pre-toilet sanitation. But what really brought me here wasn’t the history of toilets, but the future. You see, as well as running this museum, the Sulabh Sanitation Trust is dedicated to bringing toilet facilities to rural India. In the past 30 years it has provided toilets now used by 10 million people every day.

Next door to the museum the Trust maintain a working laboratory where they demonstrate how human waste can be put to work (which finally went some way to explaining the barrels of dried poo – it’s a valuable source of fuel, apparently). They run a free public toilet block on site, and incredibly the waste that it produces then powers an electrical generator and their kitchen. There is a filtration system behind the public toilets which Sulabh uses to extract nutrients from human waste, collecting methane gas for cooking and street lighting. The water is also treated and reused to water their plants (although I still wasn’t going to drink it).

For me, the most important part of their work is the low cost toilets they have developed for use in slums and rural villages. In India, as in so much of the world, sanitation is a life or death issue, with poorly disposed of waste spreading disease, so this is essential work.

Their scientists showed me around their outdoor display of toilets which are designed to keep waste away from the village water supply. To take one example, they calculate that it costs on average 1,700 Rs. (£24) to dig and fortify the substructure and 950 Rs. (£13.50) to build the superstructure. These toilets then become permanent features of villages and slums where before people would just go out in the open.

It might not be the most glamorous business in the world, but the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets is, in its own way, changing the world. It’s a dirty business, but someone’s got to do it.