OREANDA-NEWS.   Indian Railways have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) for jointly developing bio-toilets. A total number of 1563 bio-toilets have been installed in coaches up to March 2013 for field trials. It is planned to convert all coach toilets over Indian Railways with these bio-toilets after success of the trials.

 On successful development of the bio-toilets, their further time bound proliferation will be undertaken. While it would be Indian Railwaays’ endeavour to install environment friendly toilets/bio-toilets in all its passenger coaches (new as well as existing) at the earliest, the time frame for their full scale deployment cannot be forecast with reasonable accuracy as it will depend upon the changes/modifications necessitated from time to time based on the feedback on its performance, outcome of the fitment trials, exigency of their usage pattern and other service conditions. However, it is planned to induct all new coaches fitted only with environment friendly toilets/bio-toilets from 2016-17 onwards and cover the entire fleet of passenger coaches by 2021-22 provided that there is no technical or operational setback.