BENGALURU, Karnataka: Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India unveiled the Toilets 2.0 campaign in Bengaluru, on the occasion of World Toilet Day on Saturday. The campaign seeks to transform public and community restrooms in urban India through group action engaging residents and urban local bodies (ULBs).
Puri said, “India is set to go beyond the ODF narrative. Clean and safe public restrooms and public space will improve the experience and quality of public life and that is why I am delighted to launch the Toilets 2.0 campaign.
Manoj Joshi, Secretary, MoHUA added that institutional solutions are needed for problems of sanitation. To guarantee that human waste is safely contained, ODF++ protocol and certification are provided to cities. 25 per cent of our cities have already earned this designation. Cities that do not release untreated spent water into the environment are awarded the ’Water Plus’ designation.
The People for Toilets – an inter-city competition – is envisaged for cleaning and maintaining the community toilets (CTs) and public toilets (PTs) in which top-performing cities will be recognized. This will be evaluated based on the proportion of CTs and PTs improvement and the scale of public engagement.
The goal of the theme of Partners for Toilets is to form alliances with partner organisations to adopt community and public restrooms for interim cleaning, yearly operations, and maintenance, one-time financial aid, IEC activities, beautifying initiatives, innovation, feedback, etc.
In accordance with the third theme, Design Toilets (Design Challenge), which is being organized in partnership with the Council of Architecture, aspirational toilet designs for the two categories of CTs and PTs will be accepted by practicing architects and architecture students. Top designs will be chosen from the submitted entries and compiled into a compendium so that cities can decide whether or not to adopt them.
Our Toilets is a nationwide poll of residents’ opinions of public restrooms. The public will have access to a survey on the MyGov website asking about toilet aspirations. States and towns are anticipated to benefit from the survey’s findings in understanding gaps and offering course corrections. At the conclusion of the survey, each participant will receive a Champion of Change certificate.