MYSURU: After vegetable vendors and auto drivers, a public toilet in the cleanest city, Mysuru, has started accepting user charges through Paytm, perhaps the first in the country to do so.
The pay-and-use toilet located behind Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) building and run by Akhila Bharat Paryavaran Samstha on BOOT basis, embraced digital technology two months ago in order to beat the problem of small change.
The facility which is located in the heart of the city, get an average 200 customers a day. “At least 10 per cent of them, who are mostly the college students and young shopkeepers, pay through Paytm. The numbers are increasing every day as more and more people are downloading the mobile wallet after they come to know that such a facility is available in our toilet,” said Kailas Kumar Roy, caretaker of the facility.
He said compared to any other facility, it is the pay-and-use toilets where the change problem is acute. The facilities are charged from `1 to `5 here. Several customers who use the facility won’t be having change. At times, this leads to altercations between caretakers and customers while sometimes they are let go, asking them to pay next time.
In this case, the caretaker engaged in a bitter spat with an auto driver who used to give one or the other excuse not to pay for the facility. Just around that time, Roy happened to see an advertisement about Paytm in a newspaper and went for it without second thoughts.
“Every day, about 10-15 people were not paying citing change problem. Now I ask them to download Paytm and pay through it. Now the losses has come down drastically. About 15-20 people have downloaded Paytm on my insistence,” said Roy.
The toilet caretaker who hails from Samasthipur in Bihar won’t turn down people who have no money to pay stating that it will lead to open defecation which is a blot on the cleanest city.
Mayor M J Ravi Kumar welcomed it and said such initiaves will further improve the hygiene in city. He said all toilets should adopt the same in the interest
of city.