“Everyday, as you go about your daily chores, many things will pick at your conscience,” AK Singh told me, as we sat in the small conference room of AK Singh and Company—his law firm in Saket. Singh has been a practicing lawyer for over 37 years. Well over a year ago, in early 2014, he was travelling by train to Agra, with friends who were visiting from different parts of the world. It was then, he told me, that he realised what was troubling his conscience. The squalid scenery that is a part of every train journey in India made him squirm in his seat as the coach he was in hurtled past the urban slums that had sprung up beside the railway tracks. “People defecating in the open...garbage thrown on tracks…kids playing in dirtiness,” he recalled, adding, “It was embarrassing.” The memory has stayed with him.

Shortly after, Singh decided to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) regarding the matter. This litigation was filed before the principal bench at the National Green Tribunal in Delhi on 26 July 2014. The petition’s primary objective was to highlight the government’s lackadaisical response to “the huge amount of plastic and human waste” on railway stations and tracks across India. It was filed by Saloni Singh, Singh’s daughter who was, at the time, working at AK Singh and Company, and Arush Pathania, an advocate who is still with the firm. When I asked Singh why he did not file the petition himself, he said, “It is too much of a bother for me to be the petitioner, on the days of the hearing I might be occupied otherwise.”

A few months later, in October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan—Clean India Mission—to much fanfare. Buoyed by the enthusiasm that appeared to surround this programme, Singh grew hopeful about the fate of his petition. “Our petition was in line with the wish and the directive of the PM,” he told me. The Tribunal seemed to be acting swiftly too. The respondents in the petition—the Ministry of Railways (Union of India), the Railway Board, the Ministry of Environment and Forest, the Central Pollution Control Board, and the Rail India Technical and Economic Service (RITES)—were asked by the Tribunal to file replies to the petition, stating the steps they intended to take by 22 August.

Although the bench led by Justice Swatanter Kumar eventually conceded to the points that were raised in Singh’s petition, very little has changed in the past 15 months. On 7 October, earlier this month, the tribunal was attempting to understand why the slum clusters scattered around railway tracks in Delhi had not been relocated, despite the myriad problems that they result in, for both the residents and those who used these public spaces. The counsel for the railways has told the bench that it is these slums that cause the most amount of pollution, and that the Delhi government is not willing to relocate the colonies to other resettlement hubs. Meanwhile, Singh’s petition has lost its track in a depressingly familiar fashion.

The Indian railways and its cleanliness lie at the intersection of several arms that comprise India’s unwieldy state machinery. This complex structure made the issue Singh raised, a contentious one. Unsurprisingly, fingers began to point soon enough. “The main source of pollution at the tracks are jhuggies (slums) situated [nearby] and hence the problem will only be solved after the removal of such jhuggies,” the counsel for railways duly noted before the bench on 18 December. This opened a can of worms. The central issue of cleaning the railways got side-tracked; as firstly, the Tribunal had to rid the railways of slum clusters scattered around its lines.