Coming to your city soon: luxury public loos you could bathe in
The Hindu
The Ministry has decided to engage start-ups that can build such toilets across the country.
A quarter of all new public restrooms in Indian cities will soon be ‘aspirational’, with features like luxurious bath cubicles, touchless flushing, breast-feeding rooms, and automatic sanitary napkin incinerators. The high-end public conveniences may also have attached libraries, cafes, and shopping complexes to help raise funds for their maintenance and upkeep.
“A directive has been sent to all State governments to ensure that henceforth 25% of public toilet seats added in any city or urban unit are ‘aspirational toilets’,” sources in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said.
The focus areas to construct these luxury loos will be tourist and religious destinations, as well as iconic cities. In these cities, places with a high footfall — well-known markets, railway stations, inter-State bus depots and National Highways — will be given preference. The idea is to ensure the presence of such public conveniences in places where people are likely to spend more than three to four hours at a stretch. The public restrooms will be on the Google Maps’ toilet locator.
Guidelines issued to the States say that the bathrooms will need to be stain- and graffiti-free; have low height toilets and basins for children, a well-maintained patch of greenery around them, hand-dryers and paper napkins readily available, along with vending machines for sanitary napkins. An SMS-based feedback mechanism for users must also be put in place.
The Ministry has decided to engage start-ups that can build such toilets across the country. A team of experts from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur has been entrusted with the task of screening and evaluating the proposals of these start-ups. So far, 75 companies have been shortlisted, out of which 30 proposals have been finalised. The pilot project will be rolled out by October 2024, the sources said.
One of the business models being explored for the maintenance of these toilets is attaching them with other public services, such as restaurants, shopping malls, libraries, cinema halls, or even medicine shops, to make them self-sustaining.
“In many places like railway stations and airports, people might also be willing to pay for their use,” an official said.
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