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Having spent nearly Rs 1,370 crore on 1,36,985 railway bio-toilets – criticised for being “no better than septic tanks” – and after earmarking Rs 250 crore to install bio-toilets on remaining trains by March 2019, the railway ministry is now considering “upgraded” vacuum bio-toilets at a cost of Rs 6,250 crore.
Vacuum toilets, which cost around Rs 2.5 lakh per unit, will be odour-free, will cut down water use by 1/20th and have fewer chances of getting blocked, he added.
This takes the cost to Rs 6,250 crore.
In addition, vacuum toilets will need to be emptied and cleaned in rail yards.
As of 31 May, 136,965 bio-toilets have been fitted in 37,411 coaches, at a cost of around Rs 1 lakh per toilet, according to railway ministry officials quoted by the PTI. This brings the expenditure to about Rs 1,370 crore.
There is a plan to install bio-toilets in around 18,750 more coaches by March 2019, when all the coaches of the Indian Railways will be fitted with such toilets, costing the national transporter around Rs 250 crore, the PTI release added.
Indian Railways are often described as the world’s biggest toilet: They eject around 3,980 tonnes of faecal matter —the equivalent of 497 truck-loads (at 8 tonnes per truck) —onto rail tracks every day, according to a report released by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in 2013.
Bio-toilets are small-scale sewage-treatment systems beneath the toilet seat: Bacteria in a compost chamber digest human excreta, leaving behind water and methane. Only the water, disinfected later, is let out on the tracks. That’s how they were supposed to work.
In 2007, an experts committee headed by Vinod Tare, a professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, had concluded that bio-toilets developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) were not workable.
“Yet, the Indian Railways went ahead with the decision to proliferate this model,” Tare told IndiaSpend in this 7 January, 2018, interview.
Sanitation experts and various studies–including commissioned by the railways–have pointed out that most of the new “bio-toilets” on Indian trains are ineffective or ill maintained and the water discharged no better than raw sewage, as IndiaSpend reported on 23 November, 2017.
Lokendra Singh, former director of the Defence Research and Development Establishment (DRDE), had, after an expedition to Antarctica, brought home psychrophilic bacteria that can survive in extremely low temperatures.
The bacteria were mixed with cow dung and normal soil, which have methogens (microorganisms that produce methane) capable of breaking down human excreta. This was then supplied to the manufacturers of rail bio-digesters.
Singh’s claims of a scientific breakthrough were questioned: The bacterium did not have independent third-party certification, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) did not have a patent for the design and manufacture of bio-toilets, and once the tank is filled, human excreta is allowed to drop down onto the tracks.
A December 2017 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on these bio-toilets echoed the findings of our November 2017 investigation into their widespread malfunctioning: The CAG found 199,689 defects in 25,000 toilets. Some major issues were:
Responding to the CAG findings, the railway ministry said its criticism was “not correct” and that “some problems of choking were occurring on account of misuse of toilets by passengers”.
An official note from 20 December, 2017, said:
“These issues are being dealt with promptly.”
The railways ministry responded to our November 2017 investigation, pointing out what it calls “factual inaccuracies” and a lack of “technological understanding”.
We had published the rejoinder verbatim, with our response:
As a possible solution, IndiaSpend had offered the ‘zero-discharge toilets’ developed by IIT Kanpur.
“IIT Kanpur developed ‘zero-discharge toilets’ which have a separator to segregate the solid matter of human excreta from the liquid portion,” Tare, the professor, told us.
“The liquid portion, after treatment, can be used for flushing, while the solid waste can be evacuated at junctions with the aid of assembly suction pumps. Human excreta–mixed with cow dung–could subsequently be used for vermi-composting.”
The railway ministry rejected this solution saying the system “involves installation of ground handling facility to evacuate retention tanks at the terminals”.
“This involves huge infrastructure cost, man-power, terminals are landlocked, inter- track distance is not uniform everywhere,” the ministry said.
“Whereas, in IR-DRDO system, waste is treated on-board itself and thus no ground infrastructure is required. Thus, IR-DRDO bio-toilets being proliferated over IR, is a better solution,” it said.
Vacuum toilets, such as those used in aeroplanes, as we said, will need evacuation facilities and treatment plants–which will come at an additional cost to the Rs 6,250 crore likely to be spent on replacing the bio-toilets.
(The story was originally published on IndiaSpend and has been republished with permission.)
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