The Presidential Commission Of Inquiry which investigating on
the Central Bank Bond Scam has decided to request Prime Minister Ranil
Wikramasinghe to appear before the commission to give evidence regarding
the Bond scam.
The Bond Commission has inquired the Prime
Minister regarding the dates he will be available to attend before the
commission it has been reported.Earlier Bond Commission has stated that
the Commission had requested Prime Minister's office to send his
evidence through a statement.
However Prime Minister has
said publicly that he is ready to appear before the Commission to give
evidence if the Commission make a request in this regard.
“Lovers built the Taj Mahal for their love. But I couldn’t
build a loo.” So says Keshav, the lead character of a new Bollywood
movie, after his wife leaves him for failing to build a toilet in their
home. The film, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (“Toilet: A Love Story”), is a commercial film in support of governmental campaigns to improve sanitation in India.
Access to sanitation has attracted more attention in India
over the past few years thanks to the Swachh Bharat – or “Clean India”
– Mission. Launched in 2014, this project seeks to make the country free
of “open defecation” – the practice of defecating outdoors – by 2019.
The effort follows the Supreme Court of India’s recognition of
sanitation as a fundamental right in the 1990s, and the UN General
Assembly following suit much more recently in recognising sanitation as a
distinct human right.
The project will be an immense challenge for India, which
was responsible for 60 per cent of the world’s open defection five years
ago. This is particularly a problem in the country’s large rural areas.
India has a huge population and a major lack of accessible toilets –
both in private households and in public spaces. Roughly half of the
rural population are estimated to lack proper access to sanitation. In
rural areas, people often go to remote fields to relieve themselves –
separate for men and women.
To reach the 2019 goal, the country will need both behavior
change and new infrastructure to succeed. As of now, India appears to
be headed towards ensuring that every house has an individual toilet in
the next couple of years. But this will only be an important first step
in a series needed to ensure the country has interventions covering all
dimensions of sanitation.
Caste aside: despite a growing middle class, millions in India have no choice but to relieve themselves in open spaces
One of the most important challenges will be to build
community and public toilets. In a number of places, community toilets
are necessary because building individual toilets at home may not be
feasible, for instance, because of lack of space. Also, they are
necessary for people without a house, such as homeless people and
migrant workers.
The need for community toilets is already recognised as part
of current sanitation interventions but is often not implemented. And
local authorities often lack the funds to pay someone to undertake the
cleaning of the facilities once built.
Attitudes to gender and caste
India has to be careful so that the project does not
interfere with its efforts to boost gender equality. Historically,
campaigns pushing for more toilets to be built often cite the modesty of
women as the main reason – toilets after all prevent women from
exposing themselves in public.
This is also problematic as it places the burden of
adjustment on women. Indeed, in many households that have built toilets,
men do not even necessarily use them. This links with the broader issue
of people resisting the introduction of toilets per se.
The regressive nature of such campaigns is now officially
recognised with new governmental guidelines urging a rethink of
behaviour-change tactics). Yet, much more needs to be done. As long as
it is men who plan for toilets, the needs of women are either subsidiary
or not taken into account at all. Clearly,
women have specific sanitation needs, for instance, related to
menstrual hygiene. This needs to be fully integrated into any goals to
boost sanitation – a challenge in a country where periods are associated
with shame. Schemes for the provision of sanitary products constitute a
definite step forward, but these are limited and environment-friendly
disposal facilities and awareness campaigns are even more limited.
Attitudes to caste matter, too. Sanitation work is a very
sensitive issue in India because it is mainly carried out by the lowest
caste, the “Dalits” – once called “untouchables”. People from this caste
even carry out manual scavenging, the inhuman practice of manually
collecting human excrement from dry latrines to clean them – despite the
fact that the practice is prohibited by law.
With millions of new toilets, more sanitation workers will
be needed to carry out faecal sludge management. This will be difficult,
as such jobs are stigmatised. Indeed, the conditions for such workers
are often appalling – the media regularly reports on the deaths of
sanitation workers who have entered sewers without any protective gear.
Clearly one of the challenges India is facing is addressing
this social stigma to make sanitation work an acceptable and safe career
that is not reserved for a specific group in society. Mechanisation of
the process could go some way to help ensure that workers do not need to
enter the sewers.
Environmental threat
There are also risks to the environment. At present, the
toilets that are built are mostly single-pit latrines that will need to
be emptied at least once every few years. Where the pits are lined at
the bottom, the septage will need to be pumped out more regularly, and
there need to be measures in place to ensure that it is not simply
disposed of in neighbouring fields or rivers.
Where the pits are not lined, one of the concerns is the
impact on groundwater quality. In the state of Kerala, where most houses
have an unlined pit on one side of the house and a well used for
drinking water on the other side, this is a particular problem. In a
context where groundwater is the source of drinking water for around 80
per cent of the population in India, the building of so many new toilets
needs to be carefully planned.
Overall, the major progress that has been witnessed in
access to sanitation over the past few years is a first step forward. It
needs, however, to be linked to a series of other actions and an
awareness of the social and cultural dimensions of sanitation. Without
this, the country is unlikely to achieve full success. -Philippe Cullet is a professor of international and
environmental law, Soas, University of London. This article first
appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com)-
The Five member Supreme Court Judge Panel has today(02) upholds the Court of Appeals decision on United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) MP
Geetha Kumarasinghe cannot hold the MP Post due to her dual citizenship
status by dismissing the MP' s appeal submitted against the Appeals
Court decision.
After taken up a petition filed by two residents stating that the
actress turned politician MP Kumarasinghe cannot hold the MP Post due to
she holds a dual citizenship in Switzerland ,Appeals court had
previously given a verdict affirming the facts in the petition.
