Chennai: Madras University Vice-Chancellor Professor R. Thandavan said that the Indian railways should come up with an alternative mechanism to dispose of waste safely since it was virtually promoting open discharge of defecation in over 10,000 trains across the country, making itself the longest open toilet that carried 16 million passengers a day.
He was inaugurating a national seminar on ‘Sanitation for all’, jointly organised by the university’s anthropology department and the Tamil Nadu Health and Development Association (TNHDA) on Wednesday.
“Open defecation affects women’s safety and security. It is sad that more than half the population in India has a cell phone, but no toilets,” he lamented.
Citing the 2011 census data, the vice-chancellor pointed out most of India’s population preferred open defecation, with Uttar Pradesh leading the country with less than 35 per cent households having access to toilets.
Dr C.S.Rex Sargunam, former director of the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children, Chennai and TNHDA president, said that about 51.7 per cent of Indian households were devoid of toilets.
“We want the state government to make toilets mandatory by 2015 in all households as they did in the case of rainwater harvesting. We will pass a resolution, urging the railways to do away with the open discharge system in trains and come up with safe way to dispose waste,” he said.
The Indian railways currently runs over 2,000 coaches with more than 5,000 bio-toilets in various trains, which, according to the TNHDA, would not be enough.
These bio-toilets are fitted below the train coach and anaerobic bacteria convert the human waste into water and a small amount of gases (methane and CO2). The gases escape into the atmosphere and the waste is discharged after chlorination on to the track.
