PeePee Doctor takes a look at Indian Railways toilets.
BLOG: PeePee Doctor
By Dr. Khurshid Ghani
KOCHI: On the last day of the AAPI convention in Kochi I met a really interesting man. I spotted him from the crowd, and you could hardly not. Looking like a religious man or Guru with long hair and equally long beard, in traditional Indian clothing of white shirt and dothi, he stood out like a Gandhi. I thought he must be a Swami to one of the multi-millionaire healthcare magnets I had been accustomed to meeting these past few days. I was wrong. Dr. George Joseph was an internal physician who had completed his MBA in the States and after some time in the US decided to return to India. Filled with a sense of social responsibility, he has dedicated his time, energy and money tackling a simple but overlooked Indian problem. His mission: change the way human excrement and urine is disposed on Indian trains.
A proclaimed crusader of public health and sanitation, Dr. Joseph has single-handedly taken on the might of the Central Government of India and the Indian Railways services — and won. Well nearly.
The Indian Railway service needs no introduction. Famous for being one of the world’s largest employers with over 1.4 million employees, this behemoth of steel tracks transporting 24 million passengers daily, is like most things in India: a delight and an eyesore. Anyone who has traveled on an Indian train can testify that when nature calls, the toilets are open toilets where urine and excrement land directly on the ground underneath. Whether this be the flowing countryside when the train is at full speed or the tracks of a major station when the train has stopped, the Indian Railways toilet does not discriminate.
According to Dr. Joseph, 2000 tons of fecal matter is dropped on tracks spanning 115,00 kilometers every year. In the dry weather, this material becomes hard and is scattered by the force of an oncoming train like powder across the countryside. Of course, eventually it finds its way into the drinking water supply. The result is diarrheal illnesses and infections. So, beginning in 2006, he took the Railways to court and surprisingly won. In 2008, Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Railways Minister allocated 1 billion US dollars to fix the problem. Dr. Joseph felt his cause was helped by the then President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, embarrassed that a country with nuclear bombs failed the basic rigors of hygiene on a mass transit system.
The victory has however been a hollow one. Five years on Mr Kalam is no longer the President and according to Dr. Joseph, only 12 of 12000 trains produced have been fitted with a closed toilet system. His current ire is a new coach factory in Kerala which has just received 3 billion dollars of contracts. He is fighting hard for his voice to be heard and for the law to be upheld. He came to AAPI to petition this powerful lobby and get their support, and make a real difference in healthcare rather than the tin drums of multi-specialty hospital after multi-specialty hospital.
I guess when you are growing up and visit your country of birth every few years, and you see the odd guy openly defecating on the street, the open toilet system of the Indian train does not seem that bad. For Christ’s sake – at least the train has a toilet! Its India, what do you expect? Well not anymore. This is Shining India. The India of sparkly glass skyscrapers in Gurgaon and vast high tech IT parks in Bengaluru. India shouldn’t be shitting on itself everywhere it goes.
(Dr. Khurshid Ghani, is a Fellow at the Vattikuti Urology Institute, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, with interests in Robotic Surgery and Endourology. A UK Board qualified Urologist, he was awarded The Urology Foundation Robotic Surgery Fellowship from the British Association of Urological Surgeons. He is the co-author of the textbook, Endourology: A Practical Handbook.)
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