Ache in India: More toilets are odorable

Today, World Toilet Day is the perfect time to make a big stink about the fact that there are still simply not enough of them in India. There has been considerable government prodding for the construction of toilets in rural areas — a record 8,000 were made in just 20 days in January and February 2016 in Uttarakhand — but no one should rest easy; there is room for more. For instance, a new survey of 10,000 travellers in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Pune by a holiday planning website has found that India actually loo-ses out on potential tourists if toilets at important destinations are deemed unclean or unavailable.

And their verdict is that more of them are needed at railway stations, religious places, highways and even beaches. The respondents’ ranking of cities on the basis of the most odoriferous toilets should be a matter of concern too, with Kolkata in the lead, followed by Delhi, with Mumbai and Chennai in joint third place. And fragrant toilets would be considered oxymorons for very good reason. But new international research on remedying the inescapable adjunct of sanitary facilities at a molecular level is underway. So, Bill Gates’ observations on the issue in a blog this week entitled ‘A perfume that smells like poop’ is not as loo-dicrous as the headline might suggest.