Jairam Ramesh, the rural development minister has called the Railways the biggest open toilets while he was speaking about a proposal to provide more funding for bio-toilets.

He had quoted that India is the world's capital in open defecation accounting to more than 60% of all the open defecations in the world. He also said that this was something that India should be ashamed of.

The other side of the story is the sanitation problems that India face in the Railways. Indian Railways has become the biggest open toilet in the world and there is no special need to point out the condition of sanitation in the Indian Railways. “There are 11 million passengers on the trains and we all know the condition of out sanitation,” he said.

Ramesh, who is also the Drinking Water and Sanitation in-charge, said that there are only 9 trains which have 436 coaches that have bio-toilets, while 4,000 coaches are produced annually which could be fitted with new bio-toilets developed by Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO).

He also said that he offered the Railway Board Chairman, that they would provide half the cost of the retrofittings on all the 50,000 coaches with the bio-digeters developed by DRDO in no more than 4 or 5 years.

(AW- Anil)