An estimated 750 million of India's 1 billion people defecate in open buckets, unsanitary community toilets or out in the open. The toilets are maintained by a class of people known as scavengers whose job is to dispose of the waste.

Disturbed by the health, environmental and social implications (scavengers are regarded socially as untouchables), a sociologist and social reformer named Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak started an organization in the 1970s to address the problem.

The organization, Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, drew up a plan that eliminated health and environmental contamination and provided retraining for scavengers.

On Sulabh's Web site is a quotation attributed to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: "The day every one of us gets a a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of success."

Given the appalling lack of sanitation, it is not surprising that awareness about health and the environment was low among India's poor. An intensive information campaign was aimed at women, who in turn educated their families.

Public health engineers also had to be convinced, but tests in Patna, a city in Bihar state, showed that the toilets were sanitary and efficient. And experience proved that people would pay to use the bath and laundry facilities attached to the Sulabh Shauchalaya Complexes, as the toilets are known.

India has adopted the program nationwide, and Sulabh now operates more than 4,000 community toilets in 641 towns and cities in 22 Indian states and territories. Eighty-one Sulabh toilets linked to biogas plants are generating energy and fertilizer, and some systems have health care facilities.

Sulabh also has begun operating sanitation facilities at railway stations and ports and may take over maintaining lavatories on trains. More than 4,000 scavengers have been taught new trades, and India has passed legislation banning scavenging.

The governments of Bhutan, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Tanzania have also adopted the program, and Sulabh systems were used when Chengdu, China, underwent its award-winning transformation.

The database of the Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme, a unit of the United Nations Center for Human Settlement (Habitat) was a source for some of the material in these reports.