Mind your pees & queues for the Delhi Games
With just six months to go before India hosts the Commonwealth Games, some are already wondering whether New Delhi is loo-ready for the sporting extravaganza.
The capital is preparing to host more than 100,000 foreign visitors for the October Games, seen as an opportunity to show off the city as a major global destination.
Authorities have started worrying about the thousands of tourists — especially when it comes to answering the call of nature.
The sight of people urinating by the roadside is so common that residents turn a blind eye to the problem. But it’s not the lasting memory of New Delhi the city’s tourism department wants to give visitors.
To make it easier on the bladder, authorities will soon launch a Delhi “loo-map“, one that will inform tourists where public toilets are located.
The city municipality has also unveiled plans to construct 300 public toilets before the Games. And squeaky-clean ones at that. The loos are to be built in partnership with fast-food chains which will run them and woo customers.
Unfortunately, more restrooms and better sanitation is just one solution. Critics say the problem is poor civic sense and not just a lack of public urinals.
It pays to use an Indian public toilet
Last month, authorities in a southern Indian state fined people caught urinating in public view for a few days.
This week, officials in a remote town started offering people money for using public urinals.
Quite amused reading these news items, I wonder whether we are witnessing the winds of change finally in India or are we just watching another piece of local image-building exercise before elections ?
In India, a drive to ensure cleanliness in streets for a week or so is a common exercise, but people often forget such drives in a hurry and the street corners are suddenly smelling again and people using handkerchiefs and sometimes masks to cover their nose.
But the novel idea of asking people to earn money by using a public urinal was certainly worth noticing I thought.
Dozens of people are queuing up to use toilets in Musiri, a remote town in Tamil Nadu state, where authorities are succeeding in keeping street corners clean with the new scheme.
The urine was also being collected and tested for its efficacy as a crop fertiliser, an official of Tamil Nadu’s agricultural university said.
I really would like to take an autorickshaw during the Games just to check if all the training worked. And if there’s no mode of transport to get you to the loo, maybe we can have training for the tourists about being one with nature. It could be sold as part of the unique experience in India.