Pay-and-use: Dare not use before you pay by Puneet Rajhans

Pay-and-use: Dare not use before you pay

From pay-and-use-accommodation to pay-and-use toilets of excellence. Well, the travel agenda makes you bump into such centres of excellence which were raised to provide services of immaculate nature but ended up serving as seats for those who had lost all hopes of getting gainfully employed. I, for one, have not been a strong admirer of such pay-and-use structures which abound in quantity in places where they are not required and are in scarcity in places where they are needed most.
From the moment you enter a lodge in a city, well my experience in the city of Mumbai has been bitter and won't turn better anytime soon, the foremost demand from the man on the other side of the desk was the quality of treatment you would be providing to their rooms, notwithstanding the rooms they preserve have lost all qualities of being liveable. The man would run a quick check from top to toe and to cut him short from asking for an exorbitant rate the plea would be for a simple accommodation with an attached bath. The room that has just a bed to crash on and a table to park your luggage won't come with an attached bath. The attached bath is a luxury for which they would extract from you all the stored and preserved penny.If by chance in your previous outing they gave you a tv set which malfunctioned more than than the maladministration in the city, this time round they make it sure that it remains invisible. The rush to the common loo is not that taxing but the stairs t you need to climb to reach his power of seat (from where the manager-cum-caretaker issues summons and orders of high magnitude including on the need to stick to time to check out which is more reminiscent of a walk out before the scheduled time) is alarming.
As for other cities, including the one in Chennai,the pay-and-use accommodation has been a learning of sorts with no bitter experiences but equally damaging to their repute when some shut their doors as they wanted to have rents for two days when stay would have been plainly for a day and two hours. Better sum up the courage to fork out the sum demanded by them failing which your access to pay and use accommodation would be nil.
As for pay-and-use toilets, the first point of friction is on account of their faulty positioning in the city. You walk for miles to locate and once you have located to do what you were supposed to do, essentially leak and not litter, the man at the counter frowns for paying one rupee less. Despite reminding that the rupee would be handed once hands are washed the man appears to be unrelenting. Unrelenting to the point of even physically stopping you from washing hands. So some experience with these centres of excellence-cum-surveillance have been pathetic, more than the quantum of pathetic roads we hit in the countryside.
These pay-and-use structures need to rise to the occasion where their excellence stands uncontested and uncontested is the number of those who line up to leak and live.



The pay-and-use centres of excellence have rarely excelled and time is right to bring their functioning in the public realm.