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Toilet girl goes global
 CHENNAI
: A schoolgirl who has solved a centuries-old problem vexing Indian
train travellers will rub shoulders with global experts at the World
Toilet Summit in Delhi.
Fourteen-year-old K. Masha Nazeem of Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, had two years
ago designed a train toilet that would keep tracks at stations free from
filth and stench. The invention brought her a cash award at the Indian
Science Congress in Hyderabad last year, as well as a note of
encouragement from then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
The Class X student will be the only schoolgirl at the October 31-November
3 summit, where UN and government agencies will focus on public sanitation
programmes.
Masha’s achievement, at age 12 when she was in Class VIII, is remarkable
in a country where 70 crore people lack access to proper sanitation and
where water contamination by human waste is seen as the biggest health
problem.
The invitation to the summit came from A.K. Singh, an executive with
Sulabh International, which is organising the summit together with the
Singapore-based World Toilet Organisation. Sulabh is a social organisation
devoted to building cheap and hygienic public toilets.
Masha’s invention allows a locomotive driver to switch off waste release
from all the toilets when the train enters a station. The waste collects
in a tank, to be discharged by another press of a switch once the train
leaves the platform.
The device, said to be simple and elegant, had amazed railway engineers
and railway minister Lalu Prasad. Junior railway minister R. Velu had
promised to consider incorporating it in coaches built by the Integral
Coach Factory in Chennai.
“That is yet to happen,” said Masha’s father N. Kaja Nazeemuddin, a
government employee.
Kalam had suggested that Masha apply for a patent. “We have taken his
advice and applied to the Madras Patent Office. We have also filed the
complete specifications of the invention,” Nazeemuddin said.
Masha’s device made news when it won the first prize at the Southern India
Science Fair 2005 in Secunderabad.
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