Hyderabad: Press red if you are unhappy with the toilet you’ve used. Public utility managers can no longer get away with bad maintenance. The municipal corporation will soon be installing a ‘censor board’ in public toilets. If the user finds the toilet unclean or poorly maintained, he can now complain in a way that promises to be more effective.
The corporation doles out maintenance contracts on an annual basis. The annual cost for maintenance is around 8-10 lakhs per zone and as per the contract the toilets have to be cleaned thrice a day. But with the increasing number of complaints about the state of the public toilets, it is obvious that the contractors are not organising a thrice-a-day cleanup.
Apart from the state of the toilets, there are two other allegations that point towards the contractors’ personal coffers being filled. Allegedly the contractors are making money on the cleaning products. And secondly, the contractors are giving out toilet space for advertisements and pocketing the money received.
Hari Chandana Dasari, West Zone municipal commissioner, explained the functioning of the censor system. “The box includes a red, orange and a green button; it is connected to a centralised server. Once a button is pressed, the alert is sent to a dashboard placed in the concerned GHMC Circle office. The deputy commissioner or assistant engineers have access to this dashboard. For unsatisfactory overall maintenance, user can press a red button, for average maintenance, user presses the orange button and if he is happy with the status of the toilet, he presses green.”
Currently the boards are being placed in the IT corridor where the GHMC has 50 toilets — 10 each in Serilingampally, Kukatpally, Moosapet, Chanda Nagar and Patancherruvu. Toilet maintenance is outsourced and the tenders are allocated on quarterly basis.
“The boards will act as a yardstick to measure the quality of the job done by the contractor. The total number of red buttons pressed will deduct maintenance payment from the contractor. The maintenance includes cleaning, at least thrice a day and deployment of staff at the toilet”, she added.
