Social entrepreneur Lakshmi Menon creates #Toiless, a network of private toilets across Kerala for women travellers
Social entrepreneur Lakshmi Menon creates #Toiless, a network of private toilets across Kerala for women travellers
Gomathy Chechi teaches toilet etiquette. A mascot in a poster of project #Toiless, she shows users how to conduct themselves in a public loo. Initiated by social entrepreneur Lakshmi Menon, the project connects and opens private restrooms across Kerala aimed primarily at women travellers.
Lakshmi says she got the idea on a solo car drive, Traveli (Travel + Maveli) in August 2021, when the lockdown was lifted temporarily during the pandemic to encourage hyperlocal tourism. She found a dearth of clean, safe and accessible restrooms on her journey covering over 400 kilometres in five days from Kochi to Kozhikode and return to Alappuzha.
Realising a network of private homes and properties that offer their clean washrooms for travellers would be a practical and easy solution, she decided to work on setting up a ‘Pay and Use model.’ To do this, she contacted beauty parlours, supermarkets and friends, sharing the idea and enlisting the interested.
Around 15 properties have joined so far and more enquiries are coming in as the idea gains momentum. Prashanth K Nellickal and wife Sreedevi Padmaja were one of the first to join the project, after being inspired by Lakshmi’s social media campaigns. (In 2018 Lakshmi co-founded the Chekutty dolls and in 2014, she organised grandmothers in old age homes to make wicks for oil lamps, in a project called ‘Ammoomma thiri’. )
The Thiruvananthapuram-based couple have an organic store, Organogram that’s run by a team of women. “Being development professionals we travel a lot and have faced this issue first hand. I have always found my mother and wife not drinking water before a road trip, afraid that they will not find a clean toilet,” says Prashanth, who has not only thrown open the store toilet to travellers but is also preparing to add a baby station to the facility.
The next step was to reach this data to travelling women.
Locate the facility
Facilities come with add- ons like baby care station and feeding room
| Photo Credit: #Toiless
First, she contemplated investing in an App but that proved expensive. Then she turned to Instagram. “I decided to piggy-back on existing apps,” she says. Her tech-savvy friends volunteered to help create Toil Less (a toil less journey) on Instagram and the handle has 500 followers, before the actual campaign to be launched on March 8, International Womens’ Day. “I wanted the model to be accessible to seniors like my mother who is not tech-savvy but has Instagram,” says Lakshmi, explaining that users can also access it from a link shared on WhatsApp.
A property in the network is marked as a Travel Ally and has the discretion to add facilities like a shower facility, a boutique, plant nursery, free Wi-fi, charging station, a café and such along with the use of the toilet. Users pay a minimum of ₹ 30 and Travel Allies can charge more according to the extra facilities they provide.“It is left to the discretion of property owners to throw it open to all genders,” says Lakshmi explaining that many resorts that have joined the project have separate facilities for men and women.
The process, finally, is in three deliberately simple steps: Locate a guaranteed clean toilet, pay and use it, and also use any extra facilities like baby care station or a feeding room it offers.
She believes that partnering can be a business for entrepreneurs, who can lease a toilet complex and run it. Lakshmi has also roped in “dormant resources” like wedding auditoriums and convention halls in the network. Many resorts from Vagamon and Peermade in Idukki are part of the project, and “more are joining,” she says excitedly. A Travel Ally gets the benefit of brand promotion, additional income, goodwill and social media visibility.
