Indian Railways will fit bio-toilets on all its coaches by 2019, two years ahead of schedule. By 2019, all 55,000 coaches of Indian Railways would be fitted with 1,40,000 bio-toilets. Till 31 March, 2016, Indian Railways have installed around 35,000 bio-toilets in 10,000 railway coaches and are quite confident of achieving this target.

Train toilets in India have always emptied human waste on to railway tracks, an unhygienic practice that also corrodes tracks. Under its Swachh Rail-Swachh Bharat (Clean Rail-Clean India) programme, railways had planned to phase out such toilets by 2020-21.

According to estimates by RITES, an engineering consultancy, Indian Railways generates 6000 tonnes solid waste from trains and passengers at railway stations every day, out of which about 4,000 tonnes of human waste is dumped directly onto the rail tracks. Perhaps the railway ministry could hire engineering consultancy companies to provide adequate advice on how to solve this problem. In addition, they might also be able to provide alternatives to the problem of manual scavenging from the rail lines.

In 2014, Indian Railways in collaboration with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) developed a bio-toilet. Flushing a bio-toilet discharges human waste into an underfloor holding tank where anaerobic bacteria remove harmful pathogens and break the waste down into neutral water and methane. These harmless by-products can then be safely discharged onto the tracks without causing corrosion or foul odours. A stainless steel bio-toilet set with six chambers costs around Rs.90,000.

Indian Railways, which consumes 1000 million litres per day (MLD), is also planning to increase its water-recycling capacity from 12 MLD to 200 MLD in the next five years.