Patna: Making history, civic body elections in Bihar has elected a woman who worked as a manual scavenger as Deputy Mayor of Gaya. Chinta Devi, who has been scavenging for the last 40 years, has been elected to the high post after the recent municipal elections, NDTV reported.
NDTV report states that such a development is new for Gaya. In 1996, a woman named Bhagwati Devi, who was a stone crusher by profession and from the highly marginalised musahar community, got elected to Lok Sabha from the Gaya constituency. She from Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United).
The mayor-elect of Gaya, Ganesh Paswan, said that Gaya is the place where people seek enlightenment, and it is also where a musahar woman can be ascended to Lok Sabha. This time people chose to elect Chinta Devi, who used to carry human faeces on her head, as a sanitation staff when there were few toilets here. People have set an example for the entire world, he said.
Former Deputy Mohan Srivastava said that Chinta created history by winning the election. According to him, the people of Gaya support the downtrodden and work to take them forward in society.
Chinta Devi used to be a sanitation worker as well as a vegetable seller.