India to invest millions in 'green' train toilets

Indian Rail has allocated £512 million to install 'green' toilets in around 36,000 coaches to prevent human waste from corroding rail tracks.

Some 300,000 litres of human waste from "open-discharge" toilets across India's 40,000-mile rail network force railway workers to replace some tracks every two years, despite the tracks normally lasting 30 years. In last week's rail budget, which is always presented separately because of its enormity, railway minister Lallu Prasad Yadav said three toilet models would be fitted on passengers coaches: controlled discharge, biodegradable and vacuum-retention toilets.

In the first, controlled discharge model waste from toilets would be discarded onto the tracks only when any train travelled more than 18 miles an hour, while the biodegradable toilet converted the litter via a microbial or chemical process into non-corrosive carbon dioxide or chlorinated liquid.

Vacuum-retention toilets, similar to the ones in aircraft, retained the waste in a storage tank.

"We are probably the only railway system in the world that has open-discharge of faecal matter," Ganeshan Raghuram of the Indian Institute in Ahmedabad in western Gujarat state told the recent World Toilet Summit in New Delhi.

Apart from the bad smell, he added, the problem was becoming a lot more significant because of the high public cost as rail tracks and associated fittings wore out faster.

The railway's old-fashioned toilets also contaminated soil and water, particularly when monsoon rains washed the accumulated waste into rivers and lakes.

Indian Rail is the world's second largest network annually transporting over 5 billion passengers and over 350 million tons of freight.

It operates more than 12,000 passenger trains between 7000 railway stations.