Team:ICT-Mumbai/HP/Gold Integrated
The city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is the most populous city in India. The stench emanating in public toilets in Mumbai spurred us to find a solution to this scourge that afflicts the denizens of our teeming city. To understand the magnitude of this problem and design an appropriate intervention to tackle it, we
- carried out a survey to identify public toilets in Mumbai that are unbearably smelly
- approached a non-governmental organization, Sulabh International (http://www.sulabhinternational.org/), which has built and manages 640 public toilets all over India, to find out how they keep their facilities clean
- interacted with students attending a municipal school catering to those from deprived backgrounds to find out the status of hygienic practices prevalent in their localities
The information we obtained was instrumental in helping us decide and design strategies to detect and measure ammonia in air, and also helped us identify potential users of the solution that we propose to come up with.
Have a look at what we have done by clicking on the buttons below:
Mumbai's suburban railway network is the most used mode of transport for residents of this city. On an average, this system caters to more than 7.5 million commuters daily (travelling from and to more than 106 railway stations), making it one of the busiest and most crowded rail systems in the world. Unfortunately, the washroom facilities on the railway stations leave much to be desired. The upkeep and maintenance of toilets on these railway stations is the responsibility of Indian Railways, and in some cases, private contractors. Despite numerous efforts by the authorities, such as periodic cleaning, using generous amounts of water for flushing, and better awareness, commuters prefer to not use these toilets because of many reasons, the most common complaint being the stench emanating from them.
We decided to carry out a survey of suburban commuters to
- identify public toilets that are not used primarily due to the stench, and which require immediate attention
- spread awareness about how synthetic biology can help in getting rid of this issue
We received more than 100 responses to the survey, which are summarized below:
Status of public toilets
Do you use public toilets?
Is stench a deterrence to use of these toilets?
Will you use these toilets if we come up with a solution?
Our survey highlighted the issue of public toilets not being used because of the stench associated with them. Our proposed solution will impact a large number of daily commuters who will be willing to use stench-free toilets.
To find out what practices are currently followed to keep public washrooms clean, we consulted Sulabh International, the non-governmental organization behind the ‘Sulabh Sanitation Movement’ that has built hundreds of public toilets throughout India. According to Mr. Nirmal Singh, Sulabh International, Mumbai, the solution we propose could one day be used in public washrooms, provided it is economically feasible. From this interaction, we got an idea of how public toilets are being maintained and this motivated us to make this process easier and economical.
We visited K. D. Vidyalaya, a municipal school in Mumbai catering to children from lower socio-economic backgrounds, to interact with the students to find out the state of hygiene that they encounter in public toilets in their residential areas. Shockingly, only one student (out of ~20) had a toilet in her residential premises; the others presumably were using public toilets.
Our interaction with the school students has spurred us to come up with a solution that tackles the problem of smelly toilets.
