Two months after the government decided to hand over the running of the State-wide network of 1,000 plus Take-a-Break public toilets and refreshment centres to the Kudumbashree, the mission is awaiting a formal order in this regard.
The Kudumbashree has submitted a proposal with some tweaks to make the centres more profitable. It has suggested that the user fee be hiked to ₹5 or ₹10, on the lines of toilet facilities at the KSRTC bus-stations.
As a number of the centres at present have only toilet facilities, the Kudumbashree has proposed that cafes be added to them to bring in more profits for the beneficiary members.
Also, on the basis of the experience of running the centres entrusted to it by local bodies in a few interior areas, the mission has proposed that panchayats provide viability gap funding to keep the centres running.
The centres are proposed to be run from early in the morning to late at night in two shifts to attract more footfall.
Display boards advertising the presence of the centres along roads have been mooted, as also alerts on Google Map to notify travellers to their presence.
The Suchitwa Mission too has been asked to finish work on utility connections or other minor jobs and hand over the centres to the Kudumbashree.
The mission has already started work on beneficiary selection and their training so that the centres are ready for operations as soon as the order handing over their running to the Kudumbashree is issued.
As many as 1,032 of the 1,722 ‘Take-a-Break’ centres have been completed, Minister for Local Self-government M.B. Rajesh told the Assembly recently. As many as 971 of these centres have started functioning.
The ‘Take-a-Break’ centres have been proposed at public spaces such as along national and State highways or other major roads, bus-stations, and so on. The responsibility for the construction of the centres is with the local bodies concerned. Depending on the site, three types of toilet complexes can be built: basic, standard, and premium. Of the 1,032 completed toilets, 598 are in the basic category, 347 in the standard, and 87 in the premium category.
The Minister said the functioning and maintenance of these centres had been entrusted to the Kudumbashree/Ayyankali Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme members as per a government order in April last year. Some private agencies too had taken up the running of the toilets.
However, at a meeting of the Kudumbashree and Suchitwa Mission in July, it was decided to hand over the running of the centres to the Kudumbashree. Once water and electricity connections were provided in the centres that had been built, the local body concerned could hand it over to the Kudumbashree.
