Sulabh International Museum of Toilets

The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets is one of the world's most unusual and unexpectedly moving museums — a single-of-its-kind collection in West Delhi devoted to the global history of sanitation, toilets and hygiene across roughly 5,000 years, from the third millennium BCE to the modern era.

• Regularly ranked by TIME and others among the strangest museums on earth, it is far more thoughtful than its quirky subject suggests.
• Established in 1992 by the social reformer Dr Bindeshwar Pathak — founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement and inventor of the affordable two-pit pour-flush toilet — the museum traces sanitation from ancient civilisations through ornate historical commodes, chamber pots and privy replicas to modern public-health milestones, in thousands of artefacts, photographs, models and text panels.
• Behind the curiosities runs a serious thread: Dr Pathak's lifelong campaign for dignity, hygiene and the end of manual scavenging, work that won him the Padma Bhushan and the Stockholm Water Prize.
• A free guided tour brings the stories to life, and travellers leave with a genuinely new appreciation of how sanitation shapes public health and human dignity.
• For vegetarian travellers the Palam and Dwarka area nearby has good pure-veg options — Darbar Pure Vegetarian, Sagar Ratna and Bikanervala among them.