Shouldn’t RCTs be Shutdown?
An RCT is designed by the sinecure-seekers to be the administration itself! It is the first door an aggrieved person knocks. What a mockery of administrative machinery and jurisprudence!
Why should there be an Railway Claims Tribunals (RCTs) at all? Before RCTs were established all claims were handled by Railway Officers.
A tribunal is defined as under:
“a body established to settle certain types of disputes.”
We have, somehow, laid down that a claim for compensation is a dispute to start with. And, some Smart Alec in the Railway bureaucracy went ahead, proposed and created, with due approvals, sinecures for his buddies for their sunset years. One only has to see the buzz in the corridors of power to believe this when RCT vacancies are announced.
A tribunal is created to settle a dispute, just the way the CAT does, it settles disputes between an employee of the Central Government and the Government. The CAT refuses to hear a petition of an employee unless the employee has exhausted his options of administrative redress.
An RCT is nothing like that. It does not ask a seeker of compensation to first go to the Railway and demand his due and come to its doors only when denied.
An RCT is designed by the sinecure-seekers to be the administration itself! It is the first door an aggrieved person knocks. What a mockery of administrative machinery and jurisprudence!
So, an aggrieved person, instead of simply filling a form or writing a letter to the Railway, has to hire a lawyer and file a claim in the RCT.
The Railway then hires its own lawyer and contests the claim. How convenient!
Retirees and lawyers make merry at government and private expense while the poor aggrieved person is harassed no end.
If we really needed an RCT, we should have just one in the country, where the seeker of compensation should go if the administrative solutions do not satisfy him/her.
Empower the SrDCMs, DRMs, CCMs and GMs to award compensations.
All claims should be made online, whether before the Railway administration or this residual RCT. It should be laid down that there will be no personal appearances at all.
No clerk gets to write anything on file. Only officers deliberate and decide, just the way a judge doesn’t depend on the opinions of his clerks.
Government should shut down all RCTs except one. Keep that one in Gorakhpur, Hubli or Bilaspur, so that only determined retirees opt for it.
Since all interactions are online, the litigants suffer no harassment due to such locations.
-Written by a senior railway officer.
Published as received.