Start-ups sniff an opportunity building smart loos on India’s highways
Eight years ago, Neelam Singh was on a night bus from Indore to Udaipur, northern Indian cities about 400km apart.
It was past midnight when the bus stopped in a small town and she and her husband, Yashwant Suthar, left to use the bathroom.
The women’s toilets were dirty and unusable, so Singh explored the surrounding wilderness for somewhere to relieve herself. Her husband stood guard, but what ensued left Singh traumatised.
A group of men accosted her and tried to get physical. Suthar chased them away but the damage was done: it took months for Singh to overcome the incident.
Two years later, in 2017, the couple co-founded Lootel, to provide staffed smart bathrooms for travellers that are clean, hygienic and safe for women to use.
Indore-based Lootel is among a clutch of Indian start-ups that are building user-friendly rest stops along the nation’s highways.
Clean toilets and sinks are the basis of these rest stops, but all offer other services and facilities, such as cafes, stores, Wi-fi, charging stations for electric vehicles, feeding/nappy changing rooms, showers, and lounges and sleeping pods.
Over the past decade there has been an aggressive expansion of highways in India, reducing travel time and boosting tourism, but their lack of clean bathrooms suggests the government does not consider it important to provide them even as it struggles to tackle poor sanitation at the household level.
Government campaign Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), launched in 2014, aimed to end defecation in the open by 2019, but a survey in 2021 found that 19 per cent of households – out of 302 million – do not have access to a home toilet.
This helps explain why startups in India have sensed a business opportunity, even though, as Suthar puts it, “going into the sanitation business” is considered demeaning by his friends.
It also explains why an alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who specialised in automotive design, felt it necessary to immerse himself in toilet design instead.
Other start-ups owe their roots to similar stories as that of Lootel’s founders. On a trip to Ahmedabad about four years ago, Bhopalbased Ashutosh Giri Goswami found no proper facilities for his wife and children while travelling.
“That day, the idea of setting up out-of-home conveniences crystallised,” Goswami says. FreshRooms was born a year later and the brand’s first unit opened in 2019, offering a 24-hour cafe, Wi-fi, EV charging stations and lounges along with its bathrooms, which boast touchless entry, automatic sanitisers and heated toilet seats.
There are currently 11 FreshRooms facilities in six Indian states.
One of the latest entrants to the market is Travlounge, a Kerala-based start-up with US$1 million of funding that launched in March with a pilot project on the Salem-Kochi (Kerala) highway.
“One of the ladies in the family was travelling to Calicut on a bus and had a horrible time,” says co-founder Safeer Palakkathodi, of the reason for starting Travlounge. “Wherever the bus stopped, the toilets were so pathetic that she couldn’t use them and had to control herself till she reached home.
These facilities meet a need, as indicated by their popularity. The 11 FreshRooms units are used on average by 2,000 people a day, while an estimated 1.2 million people have used Lootels since it launched. Travlounge’s lone unit sees more than 100 users a day.
All three cost 10 rupees (about HK$1) per use, but each operator provides the customer with benefits.
“The amount [charged] can be redeemed against anything in the cafe,” says Suthar, while Goswami says his customers can accrue points on spending, whether on toilet use or otherwise, that can be exchanged for anything in any FreshRooms outlet.
Travlounge works on a subscription model and intends to have two categories of restaurant in each of the six units
Palakkathodi plans to have operating by the end of the year – a brand common to all and a smaller outlet that is local in style.
Suthar foresees a gradual rollout of more Lootels and is concentrating on the six that are in the pipeline, while Goswami has set his sights higher.
“There are 15 [FreshRooms] units that are getting ready and will be up soon, while we hope to have at least 200 up and running this year,” he says.
Both of these budding toilet tycoons hope to eventually have a network of up to 1,000 units. Suthar says that, in the long term, he intends to build Lootel into a recognised travel brand.
Goswami talks up his brand as a needed employer – at least four people work in each FreshRooms unit – and hopes his start-up will bring in something more intangible: social change.
“When I was at one of the units, I saw a young girl use the app and her credit to open the toilet door for a pregnant lady who was in a hurry,” he recalls.
“It is gratifying to see such moments.”