The Railway Board has a new idea to incorporate vacuum and Bio toilets. This new type of toilet will be known as the ‘hybrid vacuum toilet.’ Stinking washrooms have always been an issue in every train. More and more passengers are becoming hygiene conscious these days. On Monday, a trail run of the vacuum toilets was launched on Dibrugarh Rajdhani. There will be an observation made for few days regarding this new service.
The hybrid vacuum toilet has been fitted in the First AC coach. This service has cost around 3 lakh and it is also equipped with bio-digester system. Many who have travelled by aircrafts are aware about vacuum toilets.
According to the plan decided, the railway sector will be installing 80 hybrid vacuum toilets on Shatabdi Express. The rail sector has floated worldwide tenders for the installation of the toilets at a cost of around Rs. 25 crore. Multinational companies from across the world like USA, Spain, Germany and Denmark have also shown keen interest in the installing project, stated an official who is a part of the project.
The best part about the entire project is that the toilets are environment-friendly and the consumption of water will be lesser than before. Also, the cleanliness factor matters a lot. The same vacuum toilet will be installed at New Delhi Railway station also. For now, trains like Shatabdi and Rajdhani have been equipped with the bio toilets featuring controlled discharge system. An official, who is part of this project, stated that the waste automatically gets discharged after the trains gain the speed of 30 km per hour thus preventing the disposal at the stations.
Till now 17,388 toilets have been replaced with the new bio-toilets. More 17,000 will be replaced by the end of the year.
This is a good way to save water since a conventional toilet takes up 10 to 12 litres of water per flush whereas a vacuum toilet only takes up around 500 ml of water per flush. Most of the foreign countries use the vacuum toilet system in their trains. And since the Indian Railways are all set to modernize and change the railway systems in India, this change was important and will be helpful.