Patil puts the crown on Usha’s head. (Rajesh Kumar)

New Delhi, July 25: On the day she completed her first year in Rashtrapati Bhavan, India’s first woman President had a lady guest who also has a first to her credit.

Usha Chaumar, who was a manual scavenger in Alwar, Rajasthan, till a few years ago, is the first woman president of the Sulabh Sanitation Mission Foundation.

Today, after shaking hands with Pratibha Patil, the 33-year-old recounted how her mother taught her “to carry the filth” on her head when she was just eight.

“I knew only one sight, that of dirty toilets,” Chaumar said. “I knew I had to learn it because this was exactly what I had to do in my husband’s house, too.”

Her tale of rags and filth, though, has a golden twist. Rehabilitated by the Sulabh foundation, she was crowned the princess of sanitation workers at the UN recently. She came back with a gold crown.

“People wouldn’t come near us because they thought we were dirty,” she told Patil. “But after I came back from New York, the same people came to my house, made me sit next to them and drank the water I gave them,” she said.

Chaumar now helps other women find a way out of scavenging by stitching clothes and rolling papads — things she does for a living, too.

“The clothes we made were worn by models in shows in New York and Delhi,” she said. “I never thought I’d go there. I saw no saris there, only women wearing clothes up to their knees. Now, people also eat the food we make.”

She does realise, though, that it would take time for society to change its attitude towards scavengers. “There are 80 women who are involved with manual scavenging in Alwar.”

Patil said she hoped that the Alwar model would be replicated elsewhere in India.