Taking the cleanliness initiative to a step further, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) in association with the Quality Council of India (QCI) will upload the locations and other data of public toilets, so that they would be available for users of Google maps from the first week of December.
The step will be extremely helpful for the tourists and visitors coming to the city as most of them are using smartphones nowadays. In fact, while currently, the smartphone penetration in India is little more than 33 per cent, by 2018 it is likely to touch 36 per cent.
The officials of the Swachh Bhubaneswar Abhiyan Cell will be trained by an expert from QCI from New Delhi so that they would get an overall idea of the entire system. However, within three days time, with the help of the local sanitary inspectors, the data would be collected and later given to the QCI expert.
The city-based data would go to Google via the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and QCI is the coordinating agency across the nation for the job. It has so far uploaded the data on accessible public toilets in 45 cities and many cities like Bhubaneswar are under the process to go online with their toilets to be included on the Google map.
While cities like New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Indore, Bhopal and Visakhapatnam have already included themselves on the Google Toilet locator application besides 38 others, cities like Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Nasik, Puducherry, ludhiana, Bathinda and many more are likely to join very soon. The nation-wide process for the mapping started in May 2017.
Explaining the process of collection of grassroots data on completely accessible toilets, Kushal Srivastava from QCI said, “As the sanitary inspectors are involved in the ground-level work, we have asked them to load the required data through a mobile application called “Collect’’. This through a database creation system called Bhubaneswar Toilet locator, would collect various data including ward number, location, category of toilet, address, PIN code, opening and closing time, toilet available for which gender, is there any fee or free for using the facility, photos of the toilets from various angles, inside and outside and approach from the nearby main road etc.”
Once uploaded the toilet locator application would have a feedback system, the rating of the respective toilet facility and navigation system directing the user to the door of the nearest toilet. The BMC authorities had to spend Rs 1.8 lakh for having a service level agreement.
Srivastava clarified that while listing the toilets by the sanitary inspectors, only those having complete access for the general public could feature in the users’ list.
Currently, the city has more than 150 public, community and hybrid toilets, but many community toilets inside slum colonies and private areas could not be added to this database. So there would be around 110 toilets or less eligible for the final listing.