Railways: We have made all efforts to make the experience of rail journey safe, smooth, clean and satisfying and have achieved great results. We will continue the pace of work in this regard.

The 2019 Sankalp Patra's railway chapter opens with a claim about the past and a commitment about the future in the same sentence: "We have made all efforts to make the experience of rail journey safe, smooth, clean and satisfying and have achieved great results. We will continue the pace of work in this regard."

Of the four adjectives, one has been audited end to end for almost exactly the term in question. The CAG's performance audit of cleanliness and sanitation in long distance trains, tabled on 30 March 2025, covers 2018-19 to 2022-23 — and it is itself a follow-up to an audit reported in 2013 that had found the same problems.

The headline movement is in complaints, and it goes the wrong way: "The complaints related to coach cleanliness increased by 229 per cent during 2022-23 (2,42,431) as compared to the year 2019-20 (69,950)." The audit is fair about why, and this fact-check should be too — the Rail Madad app launched in July 2018 made complaining far easier, and the audit attributes the surge partly to "gradual increase in awareness among passengers". A rise in complaints is not by itself a rise in dirt.

What the audit's own inspections found is harder to explain away. Indian Railways had built 56 automatic coach washing plants during the period — machines that save about 7,160 litres of water per 24-coach train compared with washing by hand. Audit teams went to look at 24 of them with railway officials: "eight (33 per cent) ACWPs were not in operation due to breakdown or repair works." Because of such constraints, 1,32,060 coaches were washed manually under contract instead, at ₹2.58 crore.

The scheme meant to clean trains mid-journey did not work as designed. Clean Train Stations exist to mechanically clean toilets, doorways and vestibules during a 10 to 15 minute halt. The audit's finding is blunt about where the failure sat: the benefits "could not be fully derived due to failure of the Railway Administration in enforcing contract conditions by deploying required resources". At 29 such stations across 12 zones, inspectors saw "limited cleaning of toilets and other areas, shortfall in usage of machines and deployment of manpower" — with too few official inspections as a contributing cause.

On-board housekeeping tells the same story in rupees. A test check of 73 contracts across 32 coaching depots showed "penalty of ₹9.62 crore was recovered from the contractors" for missing manpower and machinery and for not using the specified cleaning agents. And the control system could not be trusted to catch that: it "could not prevent manipulations in the attendance system by the contractual agencies", alongside discrepancies in police verification of staff and shortfalls in scheduled inspections.

Then there is water, without which none of the rest is possible. The Railway Board decided in September 2017 to install quick watering arrangements at nominated stations; as of 31 March 2023, 81 of 109 identified stations had them, with delays of "two to four years" at the other 28. In 2022-23 alone, "1,00,280 complaints regarding non-availability of water in toilets and wash-basins in the coaches were reported", and in 33,937 of those — 33.84 per cent — the fix took longer than it should have.

Two findings cut the other way and belong in the record. In the audit's survey of 2,426 passengers on 96 trains, 89 per cent of toilet-cleaning complaints were resolved within the stipulated time, and dissatisfaction with bio-toilets was below 10 per cent in two zones — though 50 per cent or higher in five. And the audit singles out the laundry at Kankaria depot on Western Railway as a model, running on a high-efficiency thermic fluid heater with closed-loop hot oil drying and water recycled through effluent treatment, and recommends replicating it.

The manifesto claimed great results already achieved and promised to keep the pace. On the one adjective the CAG has measured across this term, the pace was uneven: real infrastructure built, a third of it not working when inspected, contracts unenforced, and the passenger-facing basics — water in the toilet — failing a hundred thousand times in a single year. Our verdict is lacks context.