There are many ways to enter Subhash Chandra Acharya’s story. At the time of Partition when he was but a child who crossed the border holding his mother’s hand. He will tell you he still remembers the unfriendly heat of that August morning when they caught a crowded train from Darshana in present-day Bangladesh to Kashipur, which is in Purulia, West Bengal.

Another point of entry could be Acharya’s childhood years in a refugee colony in Calcutta. “Every morning, my father would send me to school,” Acharya says with a laugh. Except there was no “school” but an open space and an adult taking lessons.

Or still later, in the 1970s, when he was touring rural India, building toilets.

Let’s go with the last point of entry. Those days, Acharya was an assistant engineer for the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority or CMDA; one of many hired to work for slum improvement projects.

Acharya says, “In the early 1970s, CMDA was born, after Indira Gandhi passed a bill in Parliament. The initial outlay for the toilet-building project was ₹10 crore.” Those days, Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India and Bengal was under Congress rule.

“We were asked to build several low-cost toilets per panchayat,” says Acharya. The United Nations Development Programme or UNDP came up with the design — a small makeshift toilet seat with two underground cement tanks. Each would take four to five years to fill. By then the waste inside would have turned into manure which could be safely recycled. The planning worked, except the people were not so open to its implementation.

There were hurdles galore. Villagers who could not fathom doing the deed without an open sky overhead. They would take months to get used to the idea of using closed toilets. Sometimes, they would not use it at all. Acharya adds, with some parochial pride, “But in the refugee colonies, the toilet and the tubewell were musts.” According to him, houses in East Bengal always came with attached toilets.

Then there were pradhans who colluded with contractors to build only 30 out of the 55 assigned toilets and pocketed the leftover fund, and unskilled labourers doing a poor execution of a good idea.

“Ami khub kharap lok chilam… I was a bad man,” says Acharya and for a second you catch a glimpse of the 30-year-old sombre engineer that he was then. He continues, “I would stand and watch and if I spotted a wall that was tilted even by an inch, I would make the labourers pull the whole thing down and rebuild it.”

Not just Bengal, various other parts of India were stirring with similar developmental projects at the time, says Acharya, who retired 19 years ago. Mind you, this was all happening close to half a century before the Swachh Bharat Mission. The now-dissolved Planning Commission was in its prime. Acharya recalls attending a conference at the Poonamallee Institute of Public Health in Chennai, where they were coming up with low-cost sanitation toilets that would steer people away from defecating on the beach.

Acharya also built roads and laid down waterlines across Calcutta and beyond it. From Kidderpore to Belgachia, towards Baruipur, Peyarabagan, Langalberia, Mahamayatala, Kalibazar, Budge Budge, Nangi... He worked on the Baishnabghata-Patuli township project too. For such work, Acharya had to acquire land on behalf of the government; not an easy task given the kind of negotiations it involved.

He starts to talk about individual resistances and how Emergency brought things to further boil. But he prefers to leave the rude and unpleasant details out. The point of all these half-told hard luck stories seems to be that he did not let work come to a halt for more than a few hours, at the worst.

Located in the Kidderpore area is Kabitirtha Sarani, a stretch wherein once upon a time many poets lived. Acharya worked there too, building toilets wherever needed.

He talks about the time he had to work in the red-light district under
Kidderpore Bridge. It was a regular haunt for sailors. Says Acharya, “It was an unsanitary area. Most of the women here, trafficked or otherwise, came from outside. You would think they wouldn’t care about hygiene, but they did.” He adds, “I went there with a lot of fear in my heart though the police were always with us. Those women appreciated our efforts.”