Because they have long been pushing Indian Railways to end the open discharge of human waste from railway toilets on to the tracks, and the Anil Kakodkar-led high level committee on railway safety has handed them a powerful argument by highlighting the damage that this system is causing to the tracks.
"Because of the pH content etc. of the toilet discharge, there is widespread corrosion of the rails. These toilets need to be discontinued," Kakodkar told the media.
The corrosive effects of human waste are well known. The Handbook of Corrosion Engineering by Pierre R Roberge notes how aircraft washrooms are particularly prone to dangerous corrosion due to "beverage and human excrement spills", adding that military transport planes experienced a reduction in corrosion maintenance after they replaced stand-up toilet facilities that were particularly prone to such spills.
One of the big problems faced by ecologically sound waterless urinals is the rapid build-up in corrosion from undiluted waste fluids.
Split Wide Open
The problem of excrement along Indian railway tracks is also well-known. It even had a cultural moment in Pradip Krishen and Arundhati Roy's cult film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The Annie of the title is Anand Grover, a dreamy architectural student who wants to submit a project, which involves planting fruit trees along the tracks.
Because of fertilisation from the excrement along the tracks, they will grow well and all the Railways need to do is install sprinklers on trains to water the trees as they pass.
A Problem of Plenty
Other views of the Railway's excrement problem are less benign. In An Area of Darkness, V S Naipaul's first and most horrified depiction of the India of his ancestors, he goes into a paroxysm of loathing about Indian hygiene: "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracksa¦" Rose George in The Big Necessity, her fascinating book about the world of human waste, writes that of the 200,000 tonnes of human faeces deposited daily in India, a large percentage is left on or alongside railway tracks.
The visual evidence of this is obvious to anyone who regularly travels by trains. The open defecation along the tracks is an arresting corrective to illusions about Indian Shining. The Railways may regret the damage this causes its image, but it is of less concern than the wastes its own passengers generate. George notes that Indian Railways is one of the last large institutional employers of human scavengers, to clean its tracks: "Until fully-sealed flush latrines were installed on its trains in place of the current 'open discharge' ones, scavengers were the cheapest cleaning option."
For several years now we have been promised that the dawn of non-discharging toilets in railways carriages is imminent. In his Railway Budget speech for 2008-9, Lalu Prasad Yadav declared, "Discharge from toilets of trains on the run is a primary cause for poor sanitation at stations." He said that the Railways had developed discharge-free toilets that were showing extremely encouraging results, so he pledged 4,000 crore to provide such toilets in all 36,000 coaches by end of the 11th Plan Period. That is around now and from what the Kokodkar committee says, it is clear that this has not happened and the money has been, well, discharged to no purpose.
Atmospheric pressures
To be fair to the Railways, designing a discharge-free toilet is not easy. The standard models for these in the transportation sector are the ones used in airplanes and high-tech trains where the wastes go into sealed tanks along with a disinfecting fluid. But the conditions such a toilet must face in India are laid out in a revealing tender document from 2005 from the Railways' Research Design and Standards Organisation.
These include having to deal with a temperature range from -4° to 55°C with 100% humidity and dust. Most coaches are based in coastal cities, so there is exposure to salt-laden air. Yet the toilets must be ready to be used approximately 150 times in 24 hours on journeys that could be around 77 hours (the newly-launched Vivek Express from Dibrugarh to Kanyakumari will run at over 82 hours).
The staunchest sanitation engineer would quail at such a task, and it is no surprise that ever since the Railways installed in-carriage toilets (which it is famously said to have done in 1909 after receiving an apocryphal enraged letter written by one Okhil Chandra Sen who suffered an unfortunate incident at Ahmedpur station as a consequence of eating too much jackfruit) it has taken the easier option of open discharge.
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