From Sweeping Floors, Carrying Waste For 40 Yrs To Becoming Deputy Mayor, Meet Chinta Devi

Chinta Devi, from Bihar’s Gaya has managed to script history. For 40 years, the woman worked as a sanitation worker, sweeping the floors of the municipal corporation and probably also carrying human waste on her head. She is a 60-year-old widow and has three sons, both of whom are sanitation workers. Chinta Devi even worked as a vegetable seller for some time to earn a living.

However, at the recent municipal polls held in Gaya, she won the election with an impressive margin of 16,000 votes and became the Deputy Mayor, reported News18.

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Despite her impressive win, you would be surprised to know that Chinta Devi wasn’t very keen on submitting her name for the elections. In fact, it was the other sanitation workers, including the sweepers’ union, who motivated her to do so.

While her story may seem like one in a million, in Gaya such stories aren’t new. According to NDTV, Bhagwati Devi who belonged to a highly marginalised community named Musahar and was a stone crusher by profession was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Gaya constituency in 1996 from Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal.

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“Gaya is such a place where people seek enlightenment, and it is also the place from where a Musahar woman can go to the Lok Sabha. This time the people here have set an example, probably for the entire world, by electing Chinta Devi who used to carry human faeces on her head as a sanitation staff when there were few toilets here. This is historic,” said Gaya’s Mayor-elect, Ganesh Paswan.

Great to see how the city of Gaya supports people from marginalised communities. This is what representation is all about.

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