R TAMILARASI Vs. DISTRICT COLLECTOR SALEM

JUDGEMENT

(1.) CIVILISED Ancient India: 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.) 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?