For the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary on October 2, and promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Swachh Bharat Mission, Google Maps has now listed more than 57,000 public toilets in over 2,300 cities across India.
This comes at a time when Prime Minister Modi's agenda on Gandhi Jayanti is to declare India as 100 per cent open defecation free at Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat on Wednesday evening.
According to an IANS report, there are 2.5 lakh users in India who search for public toilets every month across Google Search and Google Maps.
Adding public toilets to Google Maps was initially launched as a pilot in New Delhi, Bhopal, and Indore in 2016, in collaboration with the Swachh Bharat Mission and Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
"We believe that making information about public sanitation facilities easily accessible to people is a key element for social good -- one that also constitutes the cornerstone of the government's Swachh Bharat campaign to promote clean habits and hygiene," said Anal Ghosh, Senior Programme Manager of Google Maps on Tuesday as part of the announcement.
Users can now type public toilets near me' on Google Search, Google Assistant or Google Maps and get results at their fingertips.
"For this campaign, our product and engineering teams together built a new process to integrate toilet listings into Google Maps seamlessly," Ghosh added.
Meanwhile, the 'Google My Business' platform has helped the government take ownership of these listings on Google Maps so they could monitor visits, ratings, reviews and more, thereby, gaining insights that could help them take necessary action to maintain and upgrade toilets, the company informed.
Last year, Google Maps ran a campaign to raise awareness and adoption that resulted in 32,000 reviews, photos, and edits being added to public toilets across India by Local guides.
