Railways setting up bio-toilets on coaches

Indian Railways, in its efforts to keep station premises clean, is now manufacturing all new conventional passenger coaches fitted with bio-toilets. Railways, in the first four months of current financial year, have fitted more bio-toilets on coaches than the entire number of bio-toilets fitted in the past three years.

Railways, after receiving encouraging feedback from the users and railway maintenance staff, has ramped up the pace of fitment of these bio-toilets in Indian Railways passenger coaches.

Railways said that at present it is running 1,400 coaches with 3,800 bio-toilets in various trains. The number of bio-toilets fitted in passenger coaches during April’13 to July’13 were 2285 in comparison to 1,337 bio-toilets fitted in 2012-13, 169 in 2011-12 and 57 in the year 2010-11. The first train, Gwalior-Varanasi Bundelkhand Express, fitted with bio-toilets is running since January 2011.

This environment friendly, low cost and robust technology has been developed jointly by Indian Railways and Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) for railway passenger coaches and is the first of its kind in Railway systems in the world.