The Cockroaches of Railways | Part 11: A Rat Bit a Passenger in First AC. The Board Asked for Thirty Photographs a Day

The operating department taught the Indian Railways how to direct everybody and answer to nobody. The housekeeping directorate has been a quick student. This part reads across to “The Tyranny of Traffic”, and its companion in that series follows.

Editor’s Note: This piece rests on one Railway Board letter of 25 August 2026 and on orders already read in this publication. Where a claim comes from a reader and not from a document, the text says so. Rebuttal or clarification from the Railways is invited and will be published.

On Sunday night a rat bit the nose of a 78 year old retired officer while he slept in the first AC coach of the Una-Indore Express. His family took him to hospital at Indore, where doctors gave him the first rabies injection. A newspaper carried it the same day, with his photograph and a still from the coach. This publication posted the report on X.

@Railwhispers on X, carrying the newspaper report on the Una-Indore Exp.

रेल के दावे खोखले हैं—चूहे नाक कुतर दें और जवाब मिले कि “एंटी-रोडेंट ट्रीटमेंट” हो रहा है!

अगर सच में ऐसा हो रहा है तो कोच में चूहे-कॉकरोच क्यों हैं?

कागजों में एंटी-रोडेंट ट्रीटमेंट और जमीन पर चूहों का राज—आखिर जवाबदेही किसकी है?#IndianRailways #RodentControl @RailMinIndia pic.twitter.com/IhYlwPLY0U
— RAILWHISPERS (@Railwhispers) August 26, 2026

First AC

Not a general compartment at two in the morning on a branch line. The most expensive berth the Indian Railways sells.

A rat can board a coach anywhere. No housekeeping contract on earth guarantees a sterile train. Both of those are true.

On the Indian Railways, though, #rodent control is not an act of God. It is an item on a duty list, and it has been on that list, in writing, for eleven years.

Whose list it is on

When the zonal Environment & Housekeeping Management (#EnHM) wings were formed by Board letter 2015/EnHM/06/02 of 28 August 2015, the work named as the basis for the transfer included mechanised cleaning of stations, cleaning of coaches, linen, the On Board Housekeeping Service (#OBHS), and pest and rodent control. Three years later the Board wrote the list again. Office Order 105 of 2018 gives EnHM policy and monitoring for housekeeping of coaching trains, stations of every category and coach depots, and names pest and rodent control in the same item.

Then, on 17 October 2025, Office Order 72 of 2025 moved three more subjects across from the Mechanical Engineering (Coaching) branch. Cleanliness of coaches in service, including bio toilets and dustbins. Coach watering. The design and maintenance of coach toilet systems.

The same order, at clause 2, gave the branch hydrogen trainsets.

One office in Rail Bhawan now holds the dustbin and the hydrogen train. This publication set that out, and then pressed it.

Aug 9, 2026: “The Cockroaches of Rail Bhawan | Part 4: Feeding the Cockroaches”

Aug 17, 2026: “The Cockroaches of Rail Bhawan | Part 6: Read the Passenger List”

What was missing was a document showing the width in operation.

It arrived on 25 August 2026.

Six communities, 30 photographs, every day

Letter No. 2025/EnHM/26/02/System Improvement, signed by the Executive Director, EnHM, Railway Board, went to the General Managers of all Zonal Railways. It records that #WhatsApp groups now carry the real time monitoring of cleanliness, with officers of the field units, the Zonal Headquarters and the Railway Board inside them. It names six communities: Station Cleaning, Long Distance Trains, Swachchh Coach, Amrit Bharat Trains, a group for trains originating at Nanded, and one for DEMU, MEMU and EMU rakes.

Then it fixes the output. Each Zonal Railway “shall ensure that at least 25-30 clear and relevant photographs are posted every day”, geo tagged and time stamped where possible, covering coach exteriors, bio tank exteriors, dustbins, vestibules, platforms, circulating areas, waiting halls and foot over bridges.

16 Zones. 30 photographs each. Every day of the year.

Now read paragraph 3 against paragraph 4. Paragraph 3 says the objective “should not merely be sharing of photographs”. Paragraph 4 orders twenty five to thirty of them daily. The letter disclaims the metric in one sentence and prescribes it in the next. That is not a drafting slip. It is what happens when an office that frames policy and executes nothing needs a number to show upward, and the only thing it can count is a photograph.

The last line of the letter says these are “being reviewed at the highest level”. Of course they are. A photograph reviews well.

Three days before that letter was signed, Part 9 of this series argued that swachchhata is the antidote to the cockroaches—

Aug 22, 2026: “The Cockroaches of Railways | Part 9–Lesson: Swachchhata is Antidote to the Cockroaches”

That part meant clean administration, and it meant swachchhata as a figure of speech. Now read the letter and watch the figure collapse into the thing itself. The literal swachchhata, the kind with a rat in it, has just been fixed at thirty photographs a zone a day.

One cadre, two ethics

The method is not a mechanical invention.

The operating department and the commercial department are both manned by officers of the Indian Railway Traffic Service (#IRTS). One cadre. Two working ethics with almost nothing in common.

Commercial deals with loading parties and loading agents, and it works alone. It admits nobody. Its files, its rates and its relationships stay inside the room, and a General Manager who asks how a rebate was arrived at will find the enquiry takes longer than it should.

Operating does the opposite. It holds the network, the path and the block, and from that it has built what can only be called an owner’s complex. It directs the engineer, the electrical officer, the mechanical officer and the station staff.

Now notice what it does not hold.

It does not pay any of those officers. It does not write their confidential reports. Their money comes from their own department and their grading comes from their own head of department, and yet they take their working orders from this one. An office that can direct a man it neither funds nor grades has authority with nothing attached to it. The operating department has held authority on those terms for decades, and this publication traced the habit through seven parts—

Jul 21, 2026: “Part VI: The Tyranny of Traffic—Keep the man waiting at the gate”

Jul 22, 2026: “Part VII: The Tyranny of Traffic—The Absentee Landlord”

The mechanical department has now learned the trick.

EnHM is the classic case. It took the housekeeping work, as the Cockroach series has documented order by order. It executes almost none of it, because Office Order 111 of 2018 left station cleanliness execution with the Traffic Commercial Directorate, and the Board’s own letter of 3 March 2026 confirms that field responsibilities are unaltered. And yet it now writes to 16 General Managers and fixes their daily output.

The rat is not an outlier either. A live snake was filmed in the AC 2-tier coach of the Jasidih to Vasco da Gama weekly express on 21 October 2024, and IRCTC staff caught it with a bedsheet. A snake was found in the AC coach of the Jabalpur-Mumbai Garib Rath in September 2024. A python was taken out of an air conditioned compartment of the Puri-Guwahati Express by the Railway Protection Force, at Balasore station, of all the platforms in India. Cockroaches are routine. Toilets overflow and they stink, and on Northern Railway’s own Rail Madad returns for 1 April to 21 May 2024, coach cleanliness was the single largest cause of on board complaints, 18,845 of them in fifty one days—at 133 a day—of which the toilets accounted for 58 per cent.

And the core work, when a rat reaches a sleeping passenger in first AC, is somehow everybody else’s.

The pipe belongs to Meta

There is a second thing in that letter, and it has gone unremarked because it looks ordinary.

The Indian Railways now runs its cleanliness monitoring, up to and including officers of the Railway Board—on WhatsApp. Not on a departmental platform. Not on Sandes, the messaging service the Government of India built through the National Informatics Centre. On WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, and the letter obliges every officer in the chain to hold an account on it.

Now put two dates side by side.

On 23 July 2026 a video of the Prime Minister addressing students was taken down from #Facebook. It was restored, and Meta called it a technical error. The Government did not treat it as one. The parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, chaired by Nishikant Dubey, called the removal an attack on democracy, gave Meta’s chief executive three days to apologise, and warned that the company’s safe harbour protection in India could go. On 4 August the Centre summoned Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan. On 5 August he apologised, to the Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

Twenty days later the Railway Board of the same Minister, who also holds the Railways portfolio, wrote to 16 General Managers directing them to run cleanliness monitoring on six WhatsApp communities.

Meta apologised to him in one chair. His Board mandated Meta’s product in the other.

That is not a conspiracy and this publication does not present it as one. It is something duller and worse. Nobody joined the two files, because in the Indian Railways nobody is required to.

Zoho’s Arattai exists. Sandes exists, and it was built for exactly this. If the sensitive internal communication of a national railway must live on a chat application, why does it live on a foreign one, three weeks after that company had to apologise to the Minister who owns the railway?

There is no better mockery of “Make in India” than a Railway Board letter that mandates six WhatsApp communities. #MakeInIndia

The ask, and it is not for more monitoring

What is the success rate of On Board Housekeeping Service tenders? What is the EnHM budget, zone by zone? Print both, and print them by zone, because a national figure hides everything worth knowing.

Then the question that matters more than either of those.

The directorate was created in 2015 so that the commercial, operating, engineering and medical departments could hand housekeeping over and return to their own work. 11 years on, not one of them has handed it over. All four are still in it. Now they are in six WhatsApp groups about it as well. Why has nobody asked what the disengagement was for?

Contract management is what EnHM substantially is, and the directorate built for it is today headed by an Additional Member of the Railway Board. That post exists. It is filled. Let it carry the work.

And let a General Manager be a General Manager. Safety first, punctuality a close second, and judged on nothing else. Operating half a dozen WhatsApp communities is not a zonal priority and it is not a divisional one.

A man bitten by a rat in first AC is not a thing a Division manages daily. It is a thing that does not happen when the people mandated to prevent it do their work. #EnHM #IndianRailways

Ask the Railway Board for the photographs, by all means.

Then ask who counted the rats.

The companion to this part runs in “Part VIII: The Tyranny of Traffic—Count the Refusals”