CAT quashes two railway employment schemes

The CAT (Jodhpur Bench) has quashed two railway employment schemes under the guise of compassionate ground employment and has issued notices to the North Western Railway and the Secretary, Railway Board seeking reply on the next hearing scheduled on March 15.
These two schemes include the Safety Related Retirement Scheme for Loco Drivers and Gangmen introduced in 2004, which was later diluted by not only by extending the benefits to other services but also liberalising its provision, and recently launched Liberalised Active Retirement Scheme for Guaranteed Employment of Safety Staff (LARSGESS) by the North Western Railways on July 22, 2015.

The Central Administrative Tribunal's Judicial member K B Suresh and the administrative member Praveen Mahajan have also quashed all other corollary schemes akin to these two schemes rolled out by the railways terming these schemes discriminatory tools for hereditary succession of the government employment.
Both These schemes had been devised to facilitate employment to the wards of the existing employees followed by their opting for the voluntary retirement on the health grounds, thereby, redefining the employment on compassionate ground by ensuring 100 per cent job to the wards of the employees.
In its order, the tribunal observed that both the schemes violated the fundamental rights under articles 13, 14, 15, 16 and 39 of the Constitution and against the provision of 5 per cent quota of compassionate appointment, these schemes provided for 100 per cent replacement of an employee, who retired on full benefits.

Judicial members Suresh, while talking to the media said that these schemes were a floated in connivance of the railway and the unions causing a great harm to the public interest and beyond any doubt, the action of the Railways in issuing the circulars was ultra-vires, unconstitutional, arbitrary, illegal and against reason and logic.
"This sort of hereditary appointment had queered the pitch for the actually qualified and meritorious candidates by paving a fraudulent way of back door entry," the tribunal observed describing them as a culmination of cumulative voices of trade unions.