Train cleanliness has always been a matter of public concern.And a number of experiments have been done to improve the cleanliness but still the complaints are rising and situation remains unchanged.A fine example of how a public policy completes its cycle and repeats its cycle is manifested in cleanliness policy of railways.First, railways adopted policy to go for activity based contract then it shifted to manpower based contract and then again reverted to activity based and now again shifting to manpower based.Unfortunately, cycles of such changes have not yielded desired results and are unlikely to yield in future also.

For more clarity, activity based contract means that work has to be executed by the agency but the number of people deployed to execute the work are immaterial.The good thing in this is that focus is on completion of work and the bad thing is that agencies quote unrealistically low rates in order to grab contract which ultimately leads to low quality of work.To overcome these challenges, it is suggested that manpower based contract should be implemented. Manpower based contracts are those where manpower, which is to be deployed, is fixed and agencies are not allowed to quote below the price arrived through the estimated manpower.This results in contracts getting awarded at higher rates while performance is still not assured.They generally have very high financial implications while the output improves only a little.

The policy u-turns on the subject of train cleanliness shows that subject is still lacking a holistic understanding that involves factors affecting the quality of cleanliness and models adopted by other transporters.The most visible model is of airlines.In case of airlines, the skilled staff, in the role of air hostesses and stewards, are the pillars of passenger services and are responsible for maintaining general cleanliness.They work tirelessly to first put passengers to comfort, cater food services and then deliver sanitation services.This one in all solution has worked near to perfection and should serve as a guiding point for railways.

Railways has plethora of people on-board yet it is not able to generate satisfactory output.To ignite one’s imagination,it is important to understand that for each coach, railways hires different people for catering, ac servicing, linen distribution, ticket-checking and cleanliness.This means atleast 3 to 4 people are dedicated to each coach and yet, the results remain sub-standard leading to frequent backlash on social media.The solution to this lies in bundling of these roles into one single role and creating a talent pool to fill these roles.This can be done on the following lines.

1)Single train,Single agency concept needed: Right now each service is run by different department who allocates these services to different agencies.The result is that there are multiple agencies working on same train resulting into lack of co-ordination and as a result, the extra synergy which can be produced by co-ordination is missing.

2)Creation of licensed Workforce : It is important to create a licensed workforce for railways similar to the airlines model.Gati Shakti Vidyalya should be assigned this task to create certificate course in passenger services which can teach how multiple services can be delivered by single staff.These certificate courses should be done in large numbers to avoid scarcity and only those who have this certification should be allowed to be recruited by the agency responsible for delivering passenger services.

3)Creating Partner agencies: Rather than contracting the services of each train separately,services of all the trains in a division should be bundled into a single contract and put on block so that only single agency delivers the train services in a particular division.Such contracts should also be long term in nature with enough cushion for wage revision and statutory compliance.There should be emphasis on improving governance standards of partner agency so that they can focus on long-term rather than short-term profiteering.These should be done by bringing most of the partner agencies under ambit of companies law.

A lot of time has been lost in doing policy reversals and it is high time that a comprehensive policy should be put into place with a single control at the level of ADRM or DRM.Passenger satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any transporter and railways has to pull the bull by its horn if it really wants to see a smiling passenger.A million smiles hinges on the course taken by railways on this subject.