Bhubaneswar: With a view to help the denizens locate nearest public toilets nearest to them, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) in association with Quality Council of India (QCI) has decided to upload the locations of public toilets in the city on Google.
According to officials, Google Toilet Locator app will soon have the locations of most of the public toilets in the city. This will be effective from the first week of December.
In fact, in the next three days, civic body officials plan to handover the location details of the public toilets in the city to QCI and they will undertake the uploading process.
Significantly, the toilet locator application will also have a feedback system to rate the toilet facilities at each location. This will enable the civic body to get an idea of the cleanliness standards of the public toilets online. The BMC has spent about Rs 1.8 lakh to enter into a service level agreement for the better utilisation of this facility.
Notably, this facility is already available to denizens in cities like New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Indore, Bhopal and Visakhapatnam, where they use the Google Toilet Locator. This is a nationwide process that commenced in May 2017 and has been receiving a positive feedback across the country.
Explaining the process involved in collecting grassroots data on accessible toilets, Kushal Srivastava from QCI said “the sanitary inspectors are involved in the ground-level work and we have asked them to upload the required data through a mobile application called “Collect’’. We will collect various data including ward number, location, category of toilet, address, PIN code, opening and closing time, gender for which a particular toilet is available, fee for using a toilet facility, photos of the toilets from various angles, inside and outside and approach from the nearby main road etc”.
Meanwhile, BMC officials have clarified that they would only list the toilets that have complete access for the general public. So, the list will have toilets in parks, lake sides, government buildings, malls, shopping complexes, government hospitals, railway stations, bus terminals, BMC toilets, toilets maintained by Sulabh International and other NGOs. In all, about 110 toilets will be listed in the Google app.
Currently the city has more than 150 public, community and hybrid toilets, but many of these community toilets are inside slums and colonies.
However, the QCI expert clarified that information regarding the city toilets will only be available on the Android operating system, as it is currently been developed taking into consideration the preferences of the maximum users towards the common operating system.
In general, this move will be extremely helpful for tourists and visitors to the city, as most of them are using smart phones nowadays.
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