6
children, was about 2 or 3 feet below the surface of the road, and the door, the
sill of which was on a level with the roadway, was about 3 feet high, and, when
open, afforded the only means of entrance of air to the dark, unwholesome den
these people lived in.
22. About a quarter of the houses in Satara are provided with private
privies, there being 1,040 in the town. These are sometimes built inside the house,
but they have been mostly erected in the corner of the compound, and are there
- f o r e d e t a c h e d . T h e y a r e f o r t h e m o s t p a r t c l e a n e d f r o m t h e s t r e e t , t h e t r a p - d o o r
being screened by a wall from the public view. Below them a bamboo-basket, not
cow-dunged or made water-tight, is placed over, generally speaking, a paved bot
-tom; but nearly every one I saw, and I inspected some hundreds, was filthy to the
last degree, because no means had been provided to carry away the urine and ablu
-tion water, as there are no made drains in the town. This consequently stagnates,
putrifies, and emits a very bad stench. One of the worst examples was found
in the privies attached to the municipal offices. They had evidently not been
cleaned for some time previously, though bhangis were in the act of hastily
cleaning them when I came round after inspecting the office. The floor of the
privy is some feet below the surface of the ground at the back, and there is no
drain from it. The bamboo-baskets, although dinner leaves are put into them by
the bhangis, do not even retain all the solid matter, as I saw some floating in
the liquid filth below. This of course sinks, and a deposit is formed which is
occasionally thrown out over the surrounding ground.
23. There are 25 covered public necessaries and 14 open ones in the town.
Most of the covered public privies have 12 seats, 6 for men and 6 for women, and
are approached by separate entrances for each sex. They were all offensive, because
they are of wrong construction. The seats consist of raised stone slab-foot rests,
and below the slit in the centre is an iron-bucket; but the men frequenting them
do not make water in too many cases into the bucket, but over the front, so that in
some places pools of urine were seen. At the back is a passage for the sweeper, and
adjoining it there is a shed for dry-earth, which was not however used; for on the
open ground outside, and exposed to view, a wooden cask about 3½ to 4 feet high
is placed, into which the contents of the iron-buckets are emptied, and where the
night-soil remains during the day until it is removed by a cart at night; and this
cask is the depôt to which the bhangis bring the filth from the private privies
in the neighbourhood, the consequence being that the ground around was in too
many cases found to be fouled in the most horrible manner, as in the process of
emptying the casks by buckets, and pouring the filth into the carts, the night-soil
had been spilt on the ground. Such was seen at several of the public privies
inspected, and the smell from the cask was very offensive. The water from the
inside of the latrines is allowed to run into a rubble masonry cesspit about 8
feet long by 2 feet broad and 6 feet deep, in one of which 4 feet of thick black
filthy decomposing slush, giving off a large amount of sulphuretted hydrogen,
were measured. Many of these cesspools have been built close to nullahs. For
example the one in Budhwar Peth was a few feet above the nullah, and the filth
from it must percolate into this water-course, in which people were washing their
clothes a little lower down at the time of my visit. The public privies have in
some instances been erected too close to inhabited houses, as, for example, in
Bubasabol and Timbatalli.
24. The removal of the night-soil from the town is effected under the super
- i n t e n d e n c e o f 2 i n s p e o t o r s ; a n d t h e r e a r e o n l y 3 8 b h a n g i s i n S a t a r a f o r s e r v i c e
both in the town and Sadar Bazar, 28 of whom are employed at the 1,040
private privies, so that each man has on the average 37 privies to clean.
25. There are only 2 iron and 8 wooden night-soil carts for the removal
of the filth, and they make only eleven trips during the night. The filth is taken
to Genda Mal, an open space on the north, but which is said to be only 633