Nearly 200,000 people still engage in open defecation in Sir Lanka, Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) and Friends of the Earth Sri Lanka said.
Hemantha Withanage, Executive Director CEJ said that according to the public perspectives study conducted by the CEJ had found that a hundreds of schools do not have a proper toilet, girl students and female teachers especially suffer from this situation, most cities have very dirty toilets, many toilets build in the dry zone are not in operation due to lack of water and have converted the toilets into an animal shelter and most plantation workers and families share only one or two toilets for many lines houses.
“ Though the situation in Sri Lanka is far better we need to address the remaining issues related to water and sanitation to meet the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aims at achieving a 50 percent reduction in the number of people without proper sanitation by 2015”, he said.
He said that SACOSAN was a process to monitor achieving these targets in the South Asia region and it would provide political commitments of the South Asian nations achieving MDG targets.