Merger of all Railway services would neither be feasible nor be in the best interest of the organization

Gupta-Narain committee had rejected the Tandon committee’s recommendations

Railways’ cadre merger plan shot down by most panels

Merger of all 8 Railway services into one cadre would neither be feasible nor be in the best interest of the organization, Railway Ministry had replied to a question in Lok Sabha in 1996, citing expert committee reports on the subject. All experts and specialists of railways also say the same including Gupta-Narain committee.

On December 24 last year, the govt cited various expert committee reports, including the ones in the mid-1990s, to justify the decision to merge the existing 8 Group-A cadres into one Indian Railway Management Service (IRMS) and bring about other restructuring moves.

Unification of services has been recommended by various committees for reforming Railways. However, records show that the Prakash Tandon committee had actually recommended setting up of various committees or task forces to consider the implementability of its own recommendations.

The feasibility of its recommendation to unify various cadres and restructure the Railway Board, to study, the government had set up the Gupta-Narain committee, headed by J P Gupta, a former Railway Board & UPSC chairman, and comprising Prakash Narain, another former Railway Board chairman. This committee had, in fact, rejected the Tandon committee’s recommendations.

The Gupta-Narain committee ruled out a merger and, after consultations with UPSC, said that recruiting engineers and non-engineers through the Civil Services examination (CSE) to feed technical and non-technical requirements of Indian Railways was not possible.

The Gupta-Narain committee report was not made public, but now this is available on social media

Several govt-appointed committees appear to have processed the question of reform in Indian Railways and unification as a means to end ‘departmentalism’. Almost all the committees appear to have held that unification and creation of a single service was a problematic proposition. All most all committees had outright rejected the idea.

‘This will lead to a dangerous erosion in professionalism, efficiency and safety of train operations’, the report said about merging specialisations. It said these ‘large-scale cross- disciplinary postings will be damaging to the safety and efficiency of railway working’.

The government has decided that from 2021 UPSC (see 1996 UPSC reply to Railway) will hold a separate exam for candidates of the Civil Services exam to join IRMS, like the Indian Forest Service does.

After evaluating the Tandon committee recommendation to this effect, the Gupta-Narain panel noted that holding such an examination would bring down the quality of recruitment to the Railways. It said, “…as the best talents appear for the Civil Services Examination (due to inclusion of IAS and IFS) and Engineering Services Examination. Both of these (exams) offer wider choices to candidates. Many bright persons do not wish to appear for too many examination, specially as each examination to some extent affects the preparation for other examinations.”

About the concept of reorganising the Railway Board on ex-cadre lines, wherein an officer from any discipline can be a Board member pertaining to any other discipline – as is the plan now – the panel had noted that it would cause “havoc” at the cost of ‘specialisation’.

“Any arrangement which leads to wholesale obliteration of the specialised functional streams would have disastrous consequences affecting the efficiency of Railways and safety of operations and human lives,” it said. If an officer becomes a member pertaining to a function that he has no idea about, he is more likely to just “agree to what comes from below”, the report noted.

Several government-appointed committees, including the National Transport Development Policy Committee report, subsequently spoke against tinkering with the Railways system.

The Rakesh Mohan committee, which is cited by the government, said that “Indian Railways is too important to experiment with….”

The Debroy committee, after quoting all past committees, recommended that instead of one there should be two services – Technical and Logistics – since there cannot be a single recruitment mode for both kinds of human resources.

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread underpins this stream of thought,” the Rakesh Mohan committee said, describing this school of thought.

Source: The Indian Express

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