No clean toilets for motorists as hotels shut

Motorists travelling with special permissions during the lockdown have reported a major issue for road travel: Shortage of clean restrooms and amenities due to hotels

Motorists travelling with special permissions during the lockdown have reported a major issue for road travel: Shortage of clean restrooms and amenities due to hotels along the highway being shut during lockdown.

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Usually, national highways are dotted with brightly-lit restaurants and hotels, but the lockdown has meant they are not operational. Now, without these establishments, the highways look deserted and travellers finding it difficult to do long drives, as there is no food available and there are very few clean restrooms.

“I was stuck at a relative’s house for two months in Mumbai and finally managed to get the travel permit last week. It took us almost seven hours to reach Vadodara from Mumbai and on the entire route, we only managed to find a restroom once,” said 65-year-old Bhavna Vashi, a resident of Vadodara. Vashi made the journey home in a private vehicle last week. “While the drive was quicker than usual because there were fewer vehicles on the highway, the worry was that we could not find a single restaurant open and the only restroom we found was close to a police check point, almost four hours into the drive,” she said.

While Gujarat is still open to travel passes, some states, like Karnataka, have strict border entry rules in place which have pushed more highway hotels to remain shut as almost no vehicles are plying these routes.

For 55-year-old Sanjay Mehta, this proved to be problem when he drove to the Karnataka border last weekend to pick up his two children, who are students at a university in Bengaluru and have been stuck in their hostel for the past two months.

“Since Karnataka is not allowing vehicles, especially from Maharashtra, to enter, I first had to arrange for a vehicle to drop my children from their hostel to the Karnataka border [Belgaum]. My wife and I drove almost 500 kilometres and barely managed to find usable restrooms all the way,” said Mehta. With no hotels open, Mehta and his wife drove for six hours straight before parking their car on a petrol pump’s premises and resting for a few hours.

Last week, state home minister Anil Deshmukh said Maharashtra Police had issued over 3.5 lakh e-travel passes for those involved in essential and emergency services as well as those who need to travel to other states due to an emergency.

Vasant Pandharkar, from National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), Kolhapur district, said that with the number migrants walking on the roads declining sharply, the authorities and highway police are no longer arranging amenities along highways. “The number of migrants moving towards Karnataka through Maharashtra was huge between last week of March and end of April. That’s when we provided food water as well as sanitation facilities close to all our check posts at toll nakas. Since this population has declined and almost vanished in the last few weeks, we haven’t made arrangements for the same,” said Pandharkar.