A toilet museum meets decades of sublime sanitation

In India, the name Sulabh is synonymous with public restrooms. The organization's founder, Bindeshwar Pathak, is a giant in the world of toilets, right alongside John Harrington, inventor of the flush toilet, and Thomas Crapper, who did the plumbing for Buckingham Palace. 

Sulabh facilities are everywhere throughout India. Over the past 50 years, the organization says it has built more than 1.5 million toilets.

In 1974, Bindeshwar Pathak introduced the concept of pay-to-use public toilets in India as a way to fund their maintenance. Since then, over 9,000 Sulabh public toilets have been built across the country. 

Sulabh toilets are now in major public places, including dozens of railway stations, and are used by approximately 20 million people every day.

At the sprawling Sulabh headquarters is the Sulabh Public School, a lush green campus that serves 520 students. As we arrive in the central courtyard, kids in uniforms run around under a large blue banner declaring "Toilet first, temple later," a quote from India's prime minister, Narendra Modi. 

In classrooms that look out onto the courtyard, students practice stenography, embroidery and fashion design as part of the vocational training the school provides. 

Many of these kids' families are low-income and come from the Dalit caste, known for doing the most undesirable work -- like scavenging toilet pits. 

While the caste system no longer holds the same rigid sway it once did in India, its impact still echoes. Sulabh works to provide education and training to these students -- much of it free or highly subsidized -- to help break the cycle of poverty.

At the Sulabh School Sanitation Club, which has its own cartoon "Poo" and "Pee" mascots on a poster outside, girls make sanitary pads that the school sells for three rupees (about four cents).

Pathak developed the technology of a "two-pit" toilet, which replaced the bucket toilets that had to be manually cleaned.

The two-pit system, seen here, is a simple, cheap and useful design. The system cuts down on the need for people to clean out latrine pits -- a practice called "manual scavenging."

Using just a small cup of water, waste is rinsed from the outhouse room (in pink), and diverted down one of two channels into an underground pit, which is built with holes to allow for drainage and air circulation that will facilitate decomposition and drying. 

When the pit becomes full, waste is diverted to the second channel. 

By the time the second pit is full, the resulting waste from the first has fully decomposed and dried into an inert, dirtlike solid, and can be easily and cleanly shoveled out.

A tweet from Ram Nath Kovind, the president of India, praising Sulabh International, is displayed on the school wall. 

There's a museum of toilets at Sulabh's headquarters, which National Geographic cited as one of the 10 weirdest museums in the world. You can marvel at the history of sanitation going back to 2500 B.C., and see some exotic methods of waste management.

This is a replica of King Louis XIV's bulky wooden throne of thrones.

Here's a display commemorates the most expensive toilet in the world, a $19 million toilet NASA purchased from Russia to be used aboard the International Space Station. The no-flush vacuum system pumps urine to a filtration system, which converts it into drinking water. 

The Incinolet, is a toilet that burns poop into ash.

A technician researches materials and methods for different water purification techniques at Sulabh.

Museum curator Manoj Kumar shows off a small treatment plant where Sulabh takes the effluent from an adjacent public restroom and turns it into usable products. 

The public bathrooms on the street at Sulabh International feed the treatment plant. 

The biogas waste conversion system powers burners in a small kitchen, and the solid waste is composted and can eventually be used as fertilizer. The water is treated and recycled into toilet water and for irrigation on the Sulabh grounds. 

Sulabh has 190 of these biogas plants installed in public toilet complexes in India, and five in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Treated water from the treatment plant is used for toilets and for irrigation. 

Kumar holds out a large Erlenmeyer flask filled it with clear, odorless treated wastewater. He gives it to us to smell and then pours it onto the grass. "Nothing is waste," he says.

The Human Excreta Based Biogas Kitchen at Sulabh. 

Cooking, demonstrated here, is one way to use biogas. It also can be used for mantle lamps and generating electricity. 

In Pathak's large office, walls are lined with display cases are jammed with commemorative plates, statues and awards. 

Codified into near celebrity status for his years of social work in India,  Pathak commands reverence when he walks in the room, and greets us each with a huge bouquet of colorful flowers. 

Photos by James Martin. Captions by Martin and Ben Fox Rubin.