BHUBANESWAR: Public toilets in the Smart City will soon be on Google maps. Taking the cleanliness drive a notch further, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has initiated steps to upload the locations and other data on public toilets on Google.
With the technical support of Quality Council of India (QCI), the BMC will upload the data on Google Toilet Locator Application by this month end so that the users can access it on Google maps from the first week of December.
An expert from QCI Kushal Srivastava has arrived here on Thursday to train the officials of Swachh Bhubaneswar Abhiyan Cell. With the help of local sanitary inspectors, the data would be collected in the next three days and submitted to QCI expert.
Explaining the collection process of grassroots level data on completely accessible toilets, Srivastava said the sanitary inspectors involved in the ground-level work have been asked to load the required data through a mobile application - Collect.
“Through a database creation system - Bhubaneswar Toilet Locator - it would collect various data including ward number, location, category of toilet, address, PIN code, opening and closing time, gender specific toilet availability, fee structure, photos of toilets from various angles besides its approach from the nearest main road,” he said.
While 45 cities including New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Indore, Bhopal and Visakhapatnam have already been included on the toilet locator application, 38 other cities including Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Nashik, Puducherry, Ludhiana and Bathinda are likely to be integrated in the application soon.
The Nation-wide process for mapping the city public toilets started in May 2017 and it proved helpful for the tourists and visitors coming to the cities as most of them are using smartphones. The city-based data would go to Google via Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) while QCI will be the coordinating agency.
Currently, the city has more than 150 public, community and hybrid toilets. The QCI is finalising the list to include those in the database.The application will now be available in android-based cell phones.
While the civic body is all set to make the presence of their accessible public/community data on the Google Maps, the introduction of Online Toilet Feedback System is currently working on 10 toilets across the City.