The disgustingly smelly railway tracks may soon be a thing of the past, as the Indian Railways gets ready to install green toilets on its trains.
The swanky new toilets will store chemically treat a large part of the waste and store the rest in a separate compartment, instead of simply discharging it on the tracks, as is currently done.
The new loos are already being tried out on a train between Mumbai and Nagpur. The railway ministry seems quite satisfied with the trial runs and now hopes to introduce at least 400 coaches with the green toilets by the year-end. ?We are working on the exact specifications and we?ll place the order with the Integral Coach Factory and the Rail Coach Factory soon,? a Rail Bhawan official told FE.
The new coaches are likely to be used in trains that pass through the railway stations chosen for the ?world class station development programme,? such as Delhi, Mumbai and Patna. ?There?s not much use of building world class stations if the rail tracks continue to be dirty and smelly,? another ministry official pointed out. He added that the railways is yet to finalise a list of such trains.
However passengers on less privileged stations need not feel too deprived as the Indian Railways plans to install the new loos on all trains within the next three years. ? We will not only be building coaches with the new toilets, we will also refit old coaches with the treatment equipment and the storage compartment,? the official said.
The green toilets have been developed by the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) under the Railway Technology Mission and each such loo costs about Rs 60,000. Announced by railway minister Lalu Prasad in this year?s Rail Budget, the ministry plans to spend about Rs 4,000 crore in installing these in all 36,000 coaches.
The toilets will not only be passenger friendly but they will also help in track maintenance. At present, the waste discharged on tracks corrodes them and the decay of tracks is much faster.