Akshay Kumar is all set to release his latest movie, ‘Toilet- Ek Prem Katha‘. The plot of the story revolves around the unhygienic conditions of toilets in rural areas of India.
No. No. Please do not worry. I’m not a part of the promotion team and neither am I a film critic. But through this post, I want to discuss the real urban toilet story…
So What’s The Big Point?
Enough and more has been talked about educating people to stop open defecation and unhygienic condition of toilets in rural India. And that was rightly needed too. The situation in the rural India is still so worse that this 35-year-old American lady has built 82 low-cost toilets in homes and 1 in a school in Raebareli and Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, all with her personal money from the pocket.
My question to every one of you who’s reading this blog and those who support ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan‘, can you kindly guide me to a public washroom in any city that is safe and sufficiently hygienic to use and especially so for women.
My point is that unhygienic public toilets are not the exclusive concern for rural areas but more so for urban areas and their cityscapes too.
For example, whether you are out shopping or at our workplace, it is extremely rare to impossible to see any of the public washrooms adequately disinfected. Where most washrooms use WC toilets, the rims are used by people endlessly without being cleaned with proper disinfectants, making the users vulnerable to infections or diseases from the bacteria sitting in them. And this is not just an isolated opinion of mine but a fairly common observation as well as a concern raised by the common public, especially women. It’s high time to realize that hygiene is not a privilege, but a necessity.
[Tweet “Hygiene is not a privilege, but a necessity! #Toilet #SwachhBharatAbhiyan @swachhbharat”]
Even the curated washrooms are pathetic either due to carelessness or due to lack of amenities and toilet faucets that don’t work. Our government talks about bringing bullet trains to India, but safe, well-maintained and hygienic public washrooms, is not too much to ask, right?
Lastly, I wish Mr. Akshay Kumar and his team all the best for their upcoming film and I propose, a sequel to the film for the next time with a slight twist – with the skyscrapers in view.
image: source