Aspirational Toilets

Subject : schemes

Concept :

According to the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, a directive has been delivered to all State governments requiring them to make sure that 25% of newly built public toilet seats in any city or urban unit would be “aspirational toilets”.
These will have high-end features such as luxurious bath cubicles, touchless flushing, breast-feeding rooms, and automatic sanitary napkin incinerators.
These will be indicated as “aspirational toilets” on Google Maps.
The focus areas to construct these luxury restrooms will be tourist and religious destinations, as well as iconic cities in places with a high footfall.
The Ministry has decided to engage start-ups that can build such toilets across the country.
To make these restrooms self-sustaining, the ministry is planning to attach them into other public services like restaurants, shopping centres, libraries, movie theatres, or drug stores.

About the scheme:

The aspirational toilets scheme was launched in September 2022 as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) 2.0, with an aim to help make cities open defecation free.
The Centre has allocated ₹1,41,600 crore to the SBM 2.0, which is 2.5 times more than the money allotted to the first phase of the mission in 2014.
The cost sharing pattern with States varies depending on the population of their cities.
As of now, 6,36,826 public toilets have been constructed under the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban, against a target of 5,07,587. 4,355 urban local bodies have been declared open defecation-free.