25/07/2014
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NEWS ARTICLE:
Bio-Toilets in Railway Coaches: No Odour - No Solid waste spilling - Only odourless liquid drains out of coach
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Major...
more... initiative of IR is that the Railways is planning for giving you a "clean experience" with bio-toilets.
Bio-toilets are arguably the most complicated part of the Railways' cleanliness drive.
A stainless steel bio-toilet set - with six chambers and costing Rs 90,000 - is to be fitted beneath each of the four rest rooms in a train coach. These toilets have a colony of anaerobic bacteria that do not require oxygen to breathe.
Aerobic bacteria, which survive on oxygen and have been used in some foreign trains, have proved unsuccessful in the Indian system.
The friendly-bacteria technology, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation for use in such toilets, breaks down faeces (human waste) into methane and portable odourless liquid. This takes care of not only cleanliness but corrosion caused on railway tracks due to human droppings.
Though the Railways is installing bio-toilets on both conventional train coaches and the latest LHB (Linke Hofmann Busch - indigenised German technology) ones, it is only by 2016-17 that all NEW coaches will have such toilets. As of earlier this month, 11,800 such toilets had been installed in railway coaches.