Loo and behold: Community toilets to turn into libraries

Coimbatore: While the country is witnessing the greatest toilet-building spree in human history, thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the city corporation is planning to turn abandoned community toilets into libraries and micro composting centres.
Several community toilets, which were constructed to eradicate open defecation in slum areas, lay useless after the PM launched his ambitious Swachh Bharat campaign, under which thousands of individual household toilets were built. “At many places, abandoned community toilets have turned into dens for criminals. To check such incidents, we plan to demolish them or convert them into libraries or micro composting centres. We have identified two such facilities in Jeeva Nagar near PN Pudur and have written to the office of the commissioner of municipal administration (CMA) seeking approval,” a senior corporation official told TOI.
The civic body, meanwhile, plans to complete the construction of household toilets by the end of 2019, the official said. “We have identified as many as 1,500 households without toilets in the city.”
A survey conducted by the corporation in 2014 had found 6,056 households without toilets. “We constructed toilets at 4,862 households within five years. We will speed up the work to ensure that no household is left without a toilet in the city by 2020,” the official said.
A sum of Rs 12,0004,000 from the central government, Rs 2,000 each from the urban local body fund and the state government and another Rs 4,000 from corporate social responsibility fund of companiesis used to construct a toilet.
“In the slum areasespecially in encroached areas where there is no space to construct individual toiletswe constructed community toilets. Almost all the slums in the city limit have community toilets,” the official said.