Hello Local Guides!
My name is Hadi Abdul Gafoor and I currently reside in Kerala, India. I understand the Local Guides community consists of people from all over the world. So I will better start by giving a background about my country. In 2014, India had started a mission under the name Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission aiming a number of cleanliness factors such cleaning up of streets, tackling contamination of drinking and bathing water, etc. One of the key objective was to eliminate open defecation in mostly rural India.
Apart from the cultural and social factors behind open defecation, the major reason why this happens is due to the lack of accessibility to public toilets.
As a part of this mission, a pilot project had been initiated under the name #LooReview to review and list public toilet into Google maps to make it easier for tourists and travelers to find clean toilets nearby. Toilets nearby could be found by searching ‘SBM Toilets’ in google maps.
During that time, I was in the final semester of my college and we had this voluntary social service unit in colleges all over the country called National Service Scheme. Since I was the unit leader, I suggested to help list public toilets and at the same time also add new places and missing info to help people connect more with local businesses. Another parallel project we did was to answer wheelchair accessibility question in the public places.
A group of 50 volunteers from MES College of Arts and Science, Naravoor did this work for 7 days and it unintentionally turned out to be the longest unofficial Local Guides meet-up ever! This also helped me grow my Local Guides points to reach level 7 immensely.
A couple of months back, there was a news article which said that a total of 57,000 public toilets have been added to Google maps as part of this initiative all over the country. This surely was the proudest and most interesting moment for me as a Local Guide to have contributed to this massive achievement!