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ALWAR (RAJASTHAN) - JUST over five years ago, Mrs Usha Chaumar scraped human waste out of latrines with a tin plate held in her bare hands.
Next month, she will strut down a catwalk in New York.

The 33-year-old mother of three, who once worked as what is known in India as a 'manual scavenger', will lead 55 others like her in a fashion show before the United Nations General Assembly.

Many have never flown on a plane, let alone been out of their country.

This year is the UN's International Year of Sanitation and the July 2 event is meant to showcase the social transformation taking place among the lowest of the low in India's caste-ridden society.

Mrs Chaumar's story is a shining example.

'Who would have thought I would one day go to New York?' she told me. 'It is beyond my wildest dreams.'

Her neat, two-room house is at Hajuri Gate, a scavengers' enclave in this historic town known for its old forts and palaces in the north-western state of Rajasthan.

What is most striking, given the nature of her old occupation, is the cleanliness of her home.

While the rest of the town was waterlogged and slushy after overnight rains during my visit, her neighbourhood was not a slum by any stretch of the imagination.

The streets were swept clean, the drains were not overflowing and pedestrians did not have to negotiate murky puddles.

There are 10 such enclaves with a total population of up to 15,000 in this town of 400,000.

According to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, about 350,000 people in the country are still engaged in manually removing waste from lavatories.

More than 400,000 have been rehabilitated in recent years through a combination of training, loans and subsidies under the government's National Scheme for Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers.

'I used to go every morning to Mehl Chowk to remove the filth from 10 to 12 houses,' Mrs Chaumar recalls.

Mehl Chowk is home to high-caste Hindus, many of whom still use hole-in-the-floor latrines despite a vigorous campaign to switch to flush toilets.

The absence of an appropriate drainage system in these crowded localities makes it difficult for many to make the change.

Ironically, Mrs Chaumar's home and the row of houses on her street all have pour-flush toilets which cost only about Rs 10,000 (S$320), compared with about Rs 50,000 for a conventional one.

The people whose toilets she cleaned once shunned her.

'Now they invite me to sit in their living rooms and ask me what I will bring for them from New York. Some have even given me their shopping lists,' she said, chuckling.

Her status in society changed after 2003 when she joined the Nai Disha (New Vision) Training Centre, started by a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation working to uplift the scavengers and advocating low-cost, pour-flush latrines.

Today, she is the president of the Sulabh Sanitation Mission Foundation which rehabilitates women toilet cleaners by giving them training in various vocations.

To find out what a manual scavenger does, I accompanied Mrs Baby Nanda, 35, and Mrs Babita Atwal, 20, a bride of four months, to Meena Pari, another high-caste locality.

The two women clean about 10 latrines each every day, and are paid 10 rupees per person in those families per month.

I soon regretted my decision. The stench was beyond description and I had overestimated my tolerance level.

Armed with a broom, a small rectangular tin plate and a metal basket, the two women squeezed into narrow passageways between buildings.

They scraped up the waste into the basket with the tin plate held in bare hands.

'I had never done this before. But when I came to my husband's house here after marriage, I was told I had to do it because that is our tradition,' said Mrs Atwal, whose husband is a rickshaw puller.

'For the first few days, I just couldn't eat. The stench would not leave even after a bath. Now, I chew tobacco before I set out for work.'

To dull the senses, the women chew tobacco and men drink a local illicit brew before setting off to work.

Some of the rehabilitated women workers going to New York also took part in a fashion show at the World Toilet Summit in New Delhi last year.

Workers like Mrs Chaumar are now spurring others to give up their filthy work too.

Said Dr Suman Chahar, an adviser with the NGO behind the Nai Disha training centre: 'They have changed so much that even the way they speak has changed. They have learnt etiquette and are an inspiration to others.

'We have so many in the waiting list to join our training programme, but we find it difficult to accommodate all.'

The UN billed 2008 the International Year of Sanitation to highlight, in the words of Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, that access to sanitation is 'the most overlooked and underserved human need'.

Launching the year last November, he noted that as a result of inadequate sanitation and low water quality, 42,000 people die every week from diseases across the world.

But why stage a fashion parade by the erstwhile scavengers?

Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, chief of Sulabh International, a New Delhi-based social-service organisation that is sponsoring the visit of the group to the UN, cited Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the father of the Indian nation, who considered scavenging an 'unhealthy and hateful practice', and said it was meant to inspire others.

He told The Straits Times: 'The message is that if they leave their traditional jobs and have the necessary training, they will become empowered to do anything, even sashay down the ramp.'

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the turning pt in her life...

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...lets go back to basics