Toilets on trains in India

On the Down to Earth website there’s a good news story on how Indian Railways is planning to upgrade all its on-train toilets by 2013. At present these are “open toilets” discharging directly on to the track below − and they dump some 274,000 litres of you-know-what on the tracks every day! “Discharge-free green toilets” will replace them. It’s a big deal: Indian Railways has some 36,000 railway carridges and the new toilets will cost around INR 4,000 crore (that’s INR 40 billion to non-Indians like me, or around USD 996 million/EUR 635 million), but isn’t it a good thing to start doing in IYS2008?