Will the Railway Budget 2016 Offer Concrete Plan on Bio-Toilets?

Only lip service has been paid on issue of bio-toilets in trains, will the railway budget offer some plan of action?

Railway ministers have been making references in budget speeches to faecal discharge from trains and sanitation for at least forty years but little has changed. Twenty years ago, a railway minister announced ‘encouraging results’ from ‘experimenting with biologically degradable toilet system’; going by that, train toilets in India should have gone green. But Suresh Prabhu told Parliament in his speech last year that a third of the toilets in trains have been converted and that the “Research, Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) has been tasked with making available within a period of six months a design for vacuum toilets.”

One cannot assess the progress made on this score over time by the railways because targets and achievements are not displayed in the annual statistical sheet on its website.

Prabhu is committed to sanitation and there has been visible change at stations and in trains since he took charge in November 2014. So he protested rather vehemently when a journalist complained that the situation was unchanged at an interaction at Delhi’s Foreign Correspondent’s Club earlier this month. ‘There has been a huge improvement,’ Prabhu said. He was getting ‘thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of tweets,’ from ordinary people about the change. ‘It is not hundred percent, it is not universal,’ Prabhu said, ‘but extremely widespread.’ There is hope when a minister gets shirty on sanitation.