In 2016, in collaboration with the Swachh Bharat mission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, we launched a campaign to help users across India identify public toilet locations within Google Maps. We kicked this off as an experiment in three cities: New Delhi, Bhopal, and Indore. After nearly three years, these efforts now include over 57,000 public toilets in more than 2,300 cities across the country.
Objective of Google Maps
Our goal has always been to help people navigate and explore the world, wherever they are. We believe that making information about public sanitation facilities readily available to people is a key element of social good – it is also a cornerstone of the government’s Swachh Bharat campaign to promote clean habits and hygiene.
Improving Google Maps
We have a long history of making Google Maps more relevant, accurate, and reliable for Indian users with solutions tailored specifically for India such as motorcycle mode and offline maps. For this campaign, our product and engineering team built a new process to seamlessly integrate toilet listings into Google Maps. We worked closely with the ministry to update the maps with key information about public toilets across India, enhancing our systems to accurately display these toilets through a variety of user queries – over 250,000 users are now searching for public toilets every month via search and maps.
Finding Public Toilets
Today, all you need to do is search for “public toilets near me” on Google Search, Google Assistant, or Google Maps, and you’ll get the results at your fingertips.
Improving Public Toilets
Additionally, through Google My Business, we have assisted the ministry in claiming these listings on Google Maps so that they can monitor visits, ratings, reviews, and more, thus gaining valuable insights that can help them take necessary actions to maintain and improve the toilets.
Contribution of Local Users
We continue to receive feedback about toilets in their area from local Google Maps guides. At the end of last year, we organized a campaign to raise awareness and reliance on public toilets in India, which resulted in the addition of 32,000 reviews, photos, and edits to public toilets across India.
We are pleased to be part of this campaign and are committed to finding ways to make Google Maps more useful and relevant to users across India.
Source: https://blog.google/intl/en-in/products/explore-communicate/adding-57000-public-toilets-to-google/
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