Bhubaneswar: Taking the cleanliness initiative to a step further, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) in association with Quality Council of India (QCI) will soon upload the locations of public toilets on Google maps for the users.

The locations and other data of public toilets in the BMC areas will be available on Google maps from first week of December.

With the move, the users can easily search the locations for BMC toilets on Google maps through smartphone.

The initiative was taken in view of number of smartphone users in the smart city these days. Currently, the smartphone penetration in India is little more than 33 percent. It is likely to touch 36 percent by 2018.

An expert from QCI arrived in Bhubaneswar on Thursday from New Delhi to train the officials of the Swachh Bhubaneswar Abhiyan Cell about entire system. The data will be collected with help of local sanitary inspectors within three days and will be given to the QCI expert.

The sanitary inspectors have been asked to upload the required data through a Mobile App 'Collect'. The database creation system 'Bhubaneswar Toilet Locator' will collect various data including ward number, location, category of toilet, address, PIN code, opening and closing rime, toilet available for which gender, fee, photos of toilets from various angles and approach from nearby main road, said QCI official Kushal Srivastav while explaining the process of collection of data on toilets.

After uploading the data, the toilet locator application will have a feedback system, the rating of the respective toilet and navigation system directing the user the door to the nearest toilet.

The data will be forwarded to Google via the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA).

The QCI, which is the coordinating agency across India for the job, has uploaded the data public toilets in 45 cities so far. Many cities like Bhubaneswar are under the process to go online with data about public toilets. The nation-wide process for Google mapping began in May this year.

The cities including New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Indore, Bhopal and Visakhapatnam have been already included on the Google maps. Along with Bhubaneswar, the cities -- Guwahati, Nasik, Puducherry, Ludhiana, and Bathinda will join the Google mapping process very soon.