The Big Necessity

Excerpts from Rose George's new book: The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

Read them at The Slate. If you don't have time for it, read this paragraph:

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

Perhaps you would now want to continue to read it. What do you make of it? Where are we as a modern India? And what are millions of such people doing while we are making our grander plans of life and the universe?