National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and former Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan rued over inadequate measures of the state in ensuring civil and fundamental rights of the citizens.
While addressing a two-day national seminar in Tripura (Central) University on Friday Balakrishnan said that unfortunately a large population of the country had been deprived of basic rights like universal access to education, health service and purified drinking water.
However, because of sustained effort of NHRC over past decades, people could able to lodge complain in any human rights violation incidence with the commission, he claimed adding that NHRC was also attaching utmost importance to address the issues.
Balakrishnan pointed out that NHRC had started functioning with 495 complains of human rights violations in 1993 and now the figure of complaints rose to 10,80,000.
“Every year on an average 90,000 complains of human rights violations have been received by the commission and at present about 60,000 complain are pending for disposal,” Balakrishnan stated.
Categorising the complaints he maintained that about 34 percent of the total cases of human rights violation were against police and other security forces and the nature of complaints included illegal and wrongful detention, custodial death, atrocities in the custody.
The next major issue of complaints concerned with the denial of basic human rights by the administration.
He also reiterated despite repeated requests to the state governments, only 24 states (Tripura not in the list) of the country had constituted state human rights commission and added: “I have written personal letters to rest of the Chief Ministers to constitute the state human rights commission but the response is not encouraging.”
Among the north-eastern states, only in Assam there is a full-fledged state human rights commission. Manipur and Meghalaya are in the process of constituting state human rights commission. “In 1872, the UK had introduced the compulsory education, India took 130 years after the UK to introduce the same in the country,” Justice Balakrishnan recalled and stated in most rural areas of the country there is no hygienic water, toilets, and other basic amenities.(UNI)