Soon You May Be Able To Rate Cleanliness At Public Toilets, Mall Restrooms

New Delhi: Dissatisfied with the level of cleanliness in a local toilet complex or even ones at a mall? Soon you may be able to lodge a complaint straight from that very toilet through a feedback device. The Ministry of Urban Development which helms the implementation of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in India’s urban centres, recently issued guidelines to urban local bodies to install devices to register feedback from users to monitor how clean community and public toilets are, including those in private establishments that are accessed by the public.

“The Municipal Commissioners (MCs) of Urban Local Bodies are not only responsible for the construction of community toilets but are also responsible for their maintenance. The MCs are also responsible for ensuring proper maintenance and cleanliness of toilets located in establishments such as petrol pumps, malls, commercial complexes, district centers, etc. Hence, there is a need to provide a platform such that the MCs and various stakeholders can continuously monitor the cleanliness of toilets by seeking feedback from users,” reads a letter from Praveen Prakash, Joint Secretary and Mission Director (Swachh Bharat Mission) to the state mission directors of the programme.

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The feedback devices in question will be interactive with three buttons that can be used to indicate their opinion of the cleanliness of the toilet—red to express dissatisfaction, green to express satisfaction and green to register a neutral response.

These responses will be linked up to a publicly available online map-based dashboard to aggregate the cleanliness feedback.

According to the Ministry of Urban Development, each of these devices will cost ₹945 per month (including all capital and operational expenditure) and will be provided by Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Limited. Once an urban local body places an order for these devices, ITI should be able to provide them within 8 to 12 weeks.

The urban local bodies will be required to pay for these devices from the ‘Capacity Building Fund’ which has been allocated to them under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

The directive to install such devices has been issued to 12 states and union territories—Delhi, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Telangana, Rajasthan, Puducherry, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.