Eco toilets - Indian railways

I was extremely excited when I heard about Eco-toilets being installed on Indian Railways trains. For those of you who are not familiar with train journeys in India I suggest you read this first, nothing has changed!

An estimated two million passengers use Indian Railway toilets daily, wasting a huge amount of water and creating massive hygiene problems with 2,74,000 litres of bodily waste being dumped onto the rail tracks each day. There are notices asking passengers not to use the toilet when in stations but it is clear to see that they don’t adhere to them.

Hence my excitement when I heard about Eco-toilets! Please read this, it’s pretty interesting stuff.

Indian Railways planned to install eco-friendly toilets in all its 9,000 trains by 2011-13. Last year the Railways Budget, union minister Lalu Prasad Yadav announced a provision of Rs 4,000 crore for “discharge–free green toilets” in all 36,000 of its coaches. Very promising stuff I thought.

I went to have a look at one of the trains that supposedly had eco-toilets on board but was nearly unsuccessful after checking about 15 carriages. Finally I found one in the Three Tier Air Conditioned carriage but the staff didn’t seem to know much about how they worked or if they were still functioning. The following day I met with several members of staff from Northern Railway and I was able to read a report made about the toilets in December 2008.

The results were not promising, out of 250 inspections of toilets on seven coaches the toilets were chocked (blocked) 100 times due to bottles, cups etc being thrown down them. 52 had leakage between the pan and the toilet system and 154 inspections smelt bad. The report read “A distinctive, peculiar, stinking smell prevails all around the toilet area where coaches have bio toilets”.

By January 2009 the plugs had been taken out of the toilets so they could drain freely onto the tracks. Since then various companies have submitted tenders then failed miserably in their mission to provide environmentally friendly toilets even though the cost of the toilets is extremely high.

I then found this article from August 2009, it’s all in there and very interesting but also very sad. Back to the drawing board!

It was however interesting to read that “Under the Integrated Railway Modernisation Plan, the railways have to install controlled discharge toilet systems (cdts) in 5,000 coaches by 2010. Until March 2006, only 261 coaches had been fitted with cdts” I wonder how many have been installed and are actually functioning now! I’ll let you know when I find out.