Perhaps in a fillip to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Swachh Bharat Mission, Google Maps now lists over 57,000 public toilets in over 2,300 cities across the country, the company announced on the eve of Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary, fulfilling a key aspiration of the Father of the Nation. Meanwhile more than 2.5 lakh users are already searching for public toilets every month across Google Search and Google Maps.
Furthermore 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. Reportedly users can now type 'public toilets near me' on Google Search, Google Assistant or Google Maps and get results at their fingertips.
Ghosh added "For this campaign, our product and engineering teams together built a new process to integrate toilet listings into Google Maps seamlessly". Moreover 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.
