Marachi Subburaman

Marachi Subburaman is the founder-director of SCOPE, an organisation working on sanitation, women’s and children’s development, nutrition and behaviour change. He was named for the Padma Shri in 2021 in the field of social work, from Tamil Nadu ^[1].

Learning in the villages

Subburaman was born on 5 April 1949 in Pudupatty, a far-off Karur district village beside the Cauvery, and graduated from EVR College in Trichy ^[2]. From 1976 to 1985 he trained in rural development, health and sanitation and in designing homes with basic amenities at the Village Reconstruction Organisation in Guntur ^[2]. What he saw of rural hardship there stayed with him ^[2].

A lakh toilets

Under his leadership SCOPE has organised women’s self-help groups and run campaigns on the harm done by open defecation and the need for toilets ^[2]. Working with the Tamil Nadu rural development department and the Union drinking water and sanitation department, it has built more than one lakh toilets under government schemes ^[2].

Ecological toilets

Because conventional pit latrines, septic tanks and sewers use a great deal of water, SCOPE designed a squatting model of the ECOSAN urine-diverting dry toilet ^[2]. It saves water and turns human waste into compost and urine into liquid fertiliser ^[2]. Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and the National Research Centre for Banana in Trichy carried out two years of trials on its use in farming ^[2]. The Union sanitation department made SCOPE a key resource centre, and it has organised sanitation work in 16 states ^[2].

He has also worked on rainwater harvesting and watershed development ^[2]. SCOPE received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar for the best NGO in sanitation from President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam in 2006 ^[2].