Friday, February 8, 2008
RANTINGS
A walk on the beach may not guarantee fresh air but it sure does guarantee a good dose of stench. That was my experience today morning when I went for a walk on the Marina beach. Considered to be one of the longest beaches of the world it is in a pretty sick state right now. A main factor is the proximity of slum areas or "kuppam" in local parlance, to the beach. These people consider the beach their private property and openly defecate on it in the early morinngs. An entire compund wall has been converted into a smelly urinal. It would be better if our ridiculous chief minister, instead of providing free television sets to poor people could construct toilets for them instead of letting them live in subhuman conditions.
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4 comments:
Building public toilets is not the solution. It has been tried before, but the people make a mess of them, and are seldom cleaned regularly that people would rather use the road side again.
In Bangalore, Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy inaugurated public toilets a few months ago, but as of today, they are unusable and have been deemed a total failure.
Well, then what is the solution? Open defecation on the beach certainly is not. Constructing individual toilets for each person is not possible because most of them do not have pucca houses. I guess sanitary workers have to be hired on a permanent basis with regular check from health inspectors to ensure that the public toilets remain usable. They could even make them as pay to use for increased efficiency but how many people would exactly pay is a big question mark.
There are 3 issues here -
1. Maintenance by the govt would suck (as in the case of the toilets inaugurated by Sudha Murthy).
2. People would not pay a dime to use it.
3. Private companies would have no incentive either to maintain standards.
Someone at desicritics suggested having advertising inside the loos to generate revenue, but I am skeptical whether that would work.
I dunno. I think pay to use is the best way as it would generate some sort of revenue. If not all atleast some may be motivated to use it. Public defecation should be outlawed. Its a disgrace at this day and age.
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