In 2016, in collaboration with the Swachh Bharat Mission, Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs, we embarked on a campaign to help users across India to locate public toilets within Google Maps. Google Maps launched this as a pilot in three cities – New Delhi, Bhopal, and Indore. After almost three years, this effort now encompasses over 57,000 public toilets in 2,300+ cities across the nation.
With Google Maps, our aim has always been to help people as they navigate and explore the world, wherever they are. And 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.
We have a long history of making Google Maps more relevant, accurate, and reliable for Indian users with India-first solutions such as two-wheeler mode and offline Maps. For this campaign, our product and engineering teams together built a new process seamlessly integrate toilet listings into Google Maps. We have worked closely with the Ministry to update Maps with key information about public toilets from across India, while refining our systems to accurately surface these toilets through a variety of user queries — over 2.5 lakh users now search for public toilets every month across Search and Maps.
Today, all you need is to search for ‘public toilets near me’ on Google Search, the Google Assistant or Google Maps and receive results at your fingertips. In addition, through Google My Business, we helped the Ministry take ownership of these listings on Google Maps so they could monitor visits, ratings, reviews and more, thereby gaining valuable insights that could help them take necessary action to maintain and upgrade toilets.
Google Maps Local Guides are also continuing to feedback on toilets in their locality, late last year we ran a campaign to spur awareness and adoption that resulted in 32,000 reviews, photos and edits being added to public toilets across India. We have been humbled to be a part of this campaign, and remain committed to finding ways to make Google Maps even more useful and relevant to users across India.
Source | By Anal Ghosh, Sr. Program Manager, Google Maps
Mapping public toilets across India on Google Maps
