Stinking toilets on the Great Indian Railway will soon be a thing of past. The epic railway will get transformed given the touch and feel programme ordered by the government. The antique network will soon get a modern and customer focused environment. If the initiative of the Railway minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, goes as per plan, within three years over 40,000 passenger trains would have green toilets. After trying out a successful pilot project on green toilets on the Prayagraj Express that carries maximum number of passengers, it was decided to install the green toilets in the strong 40,000 fleet. A system similar to the one used in aircrafts, the “green toilet” has a slight modification in the design. It uses a chemical which breaks down the human waste. 75% of the waste is broken down and the rest is collected in containers. 
Designed and developed at IIT Kanpur, the green toilets would cost about $1500 each. Each coach has four toilets and installing them in mammoth 40,000 trains would mean making 160,000 toilets. I am still calculating… With private participation being called for, the prices are expected to come down. The whole issue about poor sanitary and kitchen conditions in the colonial legacy came into light when the Railway Minister took a ride in a train and got a first hand glimpse of the hellish conditions last month. The Indian railway is a remarkable network with a staff of over 1.6million. More than 11,000 trains run each day on 40,000 miles of track and it caters to over 80 million people with the tickets as low as $1 for poor people! At present, around Rs.218 crore have been sanctioned by the government to give the old and aging train fleet a makeover by bringing improvement in sanitary conditions of service buildings (including station buildings), Railway colonies and improving the condition of coaches including provision of green toilets. TribuneIndia :Image credit: Siliconeer Via: TOI
