Letters: A different view

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Bibek Debroy's piece, "Why Jamalpur still has a hold" (April 9), has several inaccuracies. He says that "once you have cleared the (Union Public Service Commission or UPSC) exam (for Special Class Railway Apprentices or SCRA), you join the IR (Indian Railways) as a Group A officer. All that is required is passing the intermediate examination or its equivalent (Class XII), with mathematics and either physics or chemistry". This is incorrect. One joins as an apprentice after the UPSC exam and becomes an IR officer only after clearing several assessments, internal and external, some of them conducted by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London.

Debroy says: "With civil engineering no longer part of its portfolio, the SCRA is only into mechanical engineering." Civil engineering was never part of the SCRA "portfolio".

He further says: "If you join through the SCRA, you are younger when you join the IR. With existing IR silos, you move up faster. You go on to become member (mechanical) and perhaps CRB (chairman, Railway Board)." Both of these are incorrect. There is no real difference in the proportion of members of different services becoming members or chairman of the Railway Board. He says that "most senior people you meet in the IR are from Jamalpur (it's a little less now)". "Is it surprising they don't want to scrap the SCRA, despite the UPSC arguing for it?" This is not only wrong but also absurd because most senior people in the IR are not even from the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineering of which Jamalpur is a small part. The other bit, about not wanting "to scrap the SCRA", is irrelevant, as the decision to do so is reported to have been taken already.

Debroy quotes Rudyard Kipling's writing from 1888 to imply that most people who join or did join Jamalpur as SCRAs had their fathers working in the railways. This is also patently wrong.

Jagdeep S Chhokar Delhi

Bibek Debroy responds:

I will leave aside Kipling; that's not pertinent. The relevant point is this: Do simultaneous SCRA and non-SCRA entry channels cause distortions? For two reasons, I think they do.

The government funds SCRA students, not non-SCRA ones, at the student stage. Nothing in the letter contests this. Second, logically, on an average, those who join the IR through the SCRA will be younger at the entry level than their non-SCRA counterparts. Irrespective of the channel used for vertical mobility and the silo, this will create a differential between the two modes. The letter doesn't contest this either. Therefore, discontinuation of the SCRA, when implemented, is indeed desirable.

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