Good ideas spread. In this case, the amazing pink bus washrooms for women in the city of Pune, India, were inspired by how nonprofits in the US were converting buses to toilets and washroom facilities for unhoused people living on the street. The city of 6 million in western India is developing the roadmap for the world’s first Smart Sanitation City, in collaboration with the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC).

The bus washrooms are life changing. Executive director Ulke Sadalkar remembers the five to six hour drives from Pune to Mumbai when she was a young girl. “Nowhere along the route was there a safe and clean toilet that we could use and so we would stop at five star hotels and try to sneak in and use their toilets without being noticed.”