Kerala Tourism has listed 750 toilets for travellers in the State

Searching for a toilet need not be a worrisome experience in God’s Own Country any more.

All that one has to do is to search it online on the website of Kerala Tourism or downloaded a mobile app and the details of toilets near your location will be available.

Not just the location, the picture of commode, whether Indian or western, photograph of the institution, working hours and holidays, access to the public if it is attached to the hotel or restaurant, whether woman-friendly or not will be made available. The user can rate the facility. Some 750 toilets mapped on the basis of a field visit and survey have been grouped into hotel, homestay, restaurant, petrol pump, public toilets, wayside amenities, shopping mall, museum/gallery, railway station and restaurants.

The link will be incorporated to the official website of Kerala Tourism https://www.keralatourism.org and mobile app and the facility is to be launched in July, Director of Tourism, P. BalKiran told The Hindu.

Modelled on the lines of the mobile apps widely used in the U. S, U.K and Australia to locate toilets, the intention is to provide precise information to the travellers, especially women, and the timings, and to make travel hassle-free. ‘Toilet Finder’, ‘Where to Pee’, ‘Sit or Squat’ are some of the mobile apps available on both Android and IOS platforms.

Good toilets

Availability of good public toilets is one of the most important conditions for tourism development and information on them is lacking in the State.

The State can take leverage of the initiative of Kerala Tourism.

The online tagging of the 750 toilets, including the ones available in public places, with geocodes has been executed by Invis Multimedia, the IT solution provider of Kerala Tourism for ₹33.04 lakh. The Working Group on Tourism that met on January has cleared the proposal.

The 750 have been shortlisted from 1,000 toilets physically checked across the State by the survey team.

The survey has given a clear idea of the diffusion of public toilet facilities in the State and Kerala Tourism can think of planning additional toilet infrastructure for the tourism sector.

The initiative comes when the government is all out to improve sanitation.