The construction of public toilets for the benefit of the community, especially marginalized groups, is in the public interest and may override objections based on sentimental grounds.

Civilised Ancient India:

1.We Indians were inheritors of a great civilisation. We are proud of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Our History texts are replete with the great style of living of our forefathers.

2.The known history of "baths and bathings" is almost 5,000 years old, beginning from Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley Civilisation when every house had bathrooms fitted with terra cotta pipes encased in bricks. In the remains of Harappa civilisation at a place called Lothal (62 km from Ahmedabad) sewerage system, drains and water supply systems were found in an excavation. It was the time when people amazingly had water-borne toilets in each house and the toilets were covered with burnt clay bricks. To facilitate operation and maintenance, they had man-hole covers and chambers. It was the finest form of sanitary engineering. But, with the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation, the science of sanitary engineering disappeared from India, only to be revived 2000 years later when French and Britishers started coming to the country.

3.Harappa village also shows evidence of building blocks separated by parallel streets, bathrooms connected by terra cotta pipes with soakage jars. In the Khukera alluvial plain, mud brick was used. But burnt bricks have also been found to have been used in drains. At Hastinapur, excavations have shown drains constructed with burnt bricks. In individual houses, several vertically placed jars with perforation at the bottom were used as soakage pits. At Mohenjo-Daro, there is a remarkable building to the west of the main street. The central focus of this building is series of rooms. The room areas are generally alike in size and shape and were used as ablution places. At Kalibangan atop one of the platforms, there lay a series of seven fire altars and to the west of these altars was a well and bath pavement, suggesting ablutions before the performance of a ritual.

An area of darkness?

4.Today we have fallen from those great heights. Mahatma Gandhi said India lives in its villages. But in the present sanitation situation where 1.5 billion under-privileged people in the developing and under-developed world of Asia and Africa, (which represents 42% of the worlds population and over half of those without access to sanitation) do not have access to appropriate facilities of sanitation and human excreta disposal, as a result of which they continue to suffer the huge burden of infectious diseases. Defecation in the open is still prevalent in India where 630 million people defecate in the open. Women are the worst sufferers as they have to go out before sunrise or after sunset for want of privacy.

5.Because of neglect of sanitation any hygiene, morbidity of infectious diseases like diarrhoea, cholera, viral hepatitis and enteric fever, remains almost unaltered. The high incidence of infectious diseases in the developing world which are primarily related to lack of sanitation, hygiene and safe water is also primarily responsible for the abnormally high child mortality in countries of Sub Saharan Africa and India.

What people want the most?

6.A survey was conducted among the people of U.S.A. and its result makes startling revelations. After a pre-millennium opinion poll, Time magazine of the US has reported that the people have voted sanitation as the most important invention of this century -more important than atomic bomb, space vehicles, life-saving drugs and thousands and thousands of other inventions which have made our times far too different and better than any that humankind had known in its recorded history. Toilet is one single small-time invention that has made us civilized persons to enjoy splitting atom, probing the psyche, splicing genes, cloning sheep, inventing plastic, radar, silicon chips, television, satellite, telephone and everything else that has changed this century beyond recognition. Toilet is humankinds top achievement.

Constitutional cover for the local self government:

7.Ultim