Stand or squat, but win a buck on the spot

Fed up with people defecating in the open, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has decided to reward residents for making the trip to any of its 300 public toilets in the city.
 
Paan stained walls, garbage strewn on roads, pavements and public places and people defecating out in the open immune to the disgusted looks of commuters and motorists alike are scenes that most of us Indians are very familiar, though not comfortable with.

These are all tell-tale signs of life in any Indian metro or even smaller cities for that matter to which a foreigner might shudder in disgust or just stare in bewildered amazement but an Indian is most likely to just shrug in indifference and walk on or simply look away.

Even as a large majority of the Indian populace have come to terms with these rather common but revolting sights of the Indian way of life, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has decided to step upto the plate and attempt to put a stop to the obnoxious practice of people urinating and defecating in public.

In a novel experiment the corporation has decided to reward city residents with a sum of INR 1for using any of its 300 public toilets spread across the city, as opposed to relieving themselves on arterial roads, busy pavements, parks and other public places that now more often than not, reek of urine.

According to the corporation health officer, Bhavik Joshi, the scheme would first be given a trial at approx 67 public facilities across the city which will be manned by AMC officers holding a bag of coins in one hand (and their nose with the other?), hoping to entice city denizens to use the facilities and claim the reward for doing so. If the experiment proves successful, the corporation plans to extend it across all the 300 public toilets in the city.

Inspired in part by the Prime Minister's Swach Bharat Abhiyaan, the drive hopes to motivate maximum people to use public toilets in a desperate attempt at stopping the practice of scores of people blissfully relieving themselves in full public view.

To ensure that the drive is taken with complete seriousness by the denizens of Ahmedabad, a senior official of the AMC further stated that repeat offenders would be duly ‘identified and encouraged' to use coin-paying public toilets, though he declined to elaborate on how exactly this would be done, stating instead that the objective was to prevent open defecation in parts of the city where people, despite having access to public toilets chose to defecate in the open.

Many people in India consider toilets unhygienic and prefer to squat in the open far away from their home believing it more sanitary. According to Unicef estimates, approx 594 mn people or nearly half of India's population, defecate in the open, with the worst offenders being people living in poor rural areas with no access to public facilities.