Meet the nominee: The Tiger Toilet from India

Solving the problem of sanitation for rural India

India faces critical challenges regarding providing safe sanitation to its people, leading to long-term consequences regarding health and wellbeing, especially for the millions of low income households across India. 

The Tiger Toilet uses Tiger technology, which has been in development for the past seven years . The technology was created in response to the issue of waste management in low-income areas of rural India. In these areas, open defecation is a significant public health issue, and the main sanitation facility is the pit latrine. Latrines require maintenance of fecal sludge. This creates unpleasant smells and they have to be emptied at a high cost if there is access to emptying services at all. The Tiger Toilet responds to these challenges in a number of ways, and offers a complete solution to the rural sanitation as an alternative to septic tanks and pits.         

Founder Ajeet Oak is a civil engineer who has worked in water and sanitation sector for close to 30 years. For the last 6 years, he has been leading the development and commercialization of the Tiger Toilet, the Tiger Bio Filter and Fecal Sludge Treatment technologies. In this time, over 4,500 Tiger Toilets have been installed in 50 villages across India, with an impact for over 35,000 people. In the next five years, Oak hopes to reach 1 million homes with the Tiger Technology and help India achieve it’s rural sanitation targets.

How does it work?

The Tiger Toilet is self-contained toilet room which utilizes a vermifiltration system, using the capacity of earthworms to compost and neutralize human waste. It provides a “flush and forget” service. In a compact digester behind the toilet, waste is neutralized by a worm-based ecosystem linked to a pour-flush toilet pan which uses 1-2 liters of water per flush. Solid waste is rapidly and completely digested by the worms. As a result, there are no smells and no requirement to de-sludge and the resulting vermicompost only needs to be removed every 8 to 10 years.

    Tiger Toilets with digesters.

 What’s next?

The Tiger technology is being commercialised and scaled up through the new venture TBF Environemnetal solutions Pvt Ltd. A number of successful installations have proven the low-maintenance, afforddable technology in the field, which is now well on its way to scale up.

Furthermore, the compositing digester can be sold separately to fit any existing structure or retrofitted to a latrine, which is an even lower cost alternative.

Oak states that the next steps for Tiger Technologies are to grow the business, as significant demand already exists for the product. Oak also plans to set up new assembly centers in order to best service the market and use the Tiger Toilet to help improve India’s sanitation and health problems.

Join Ajeet Oak at the Sarphati Sanitation Awards 2019

The Tiger Toilet is one of the three final nominees for the Sarphati Sanitation Award for Promising Entrepreneur. The theme for this year’s award is integrated, decentralized solutions for the urban context.

The winner of the Sarphati Sanitation Award for Promising Entrepreneur will be announced during the Opening Ceremony of the Amsterdam International Water week (AIWW) conference (You are leaving this website) on Monday, 4th of November in the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre.

For more information about this year’s Sarphati Sanitation Awards (You are leaving this website) and the first Sarphati Sanitation Symposium 2019 (You are leaving this website), please don't hesitate to contact us via [email protected] (You are leaving this website) or follow us on Twitter (You are leaving this website) or Facebook (You are leaving this website).