Railways to rationalise staff strength

Railways has undertaken an exercise to rationalize the number of employees working in the state transporter and shortlisted four human resource audit companies for the task.
An HR audit company would be identified and entrusted with the task of studying the entire gazetted staff strength, said Railway Board Member (Staff) Pradeep Kumar here today.
Four companies shortlisted for this purpose are Earnst and Young, Deloitte, Price cooper waterhouse and KPMG.
The HR company will examine the Railways' manpower given the technological development/changes in operational and maintenance practices and determine the optimal level of the staff strength in the coming years, Kumar said.

Currently railways employs 13.36 lakh gazetted and non-gazetted workers.
"We will also hire a reputed consultant to examine the strength in non-gazetted section to study the system and requirement and see if there is any extra flab," he said.

The Railways will also take into account the international benchmarks before deciding on the issue, the Member (Staff) said.
On the Debroy Committee's recommendation that railways should not involve in other activities such as running schools, hospitals and RPF, Kumar said "The committee has just given its report and we have to examine it."
However, he added "there has to be a system to keep railways and its employees in good health. Eventually, to run the Railway system there has to be some agencies to do the job."

Railways has also taken steps to conduct all examinations online as a fool-proof measures against malpractices.
He said as a major IT initiative, online applications were introduced in two recent exams for the posts of Senior Section Engineers and Junior Engineers (SSEs/JEs) and Para-Medical categories respectively to bring transparency and certainty into recruitment process.
As per the new system, the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) candidates can keep the question booklets. A pilot project of uploading of answer keys and cut-off marks was initiated in 2014-15, he said.
In the railway recruitment drive during 2014-15, examinations were conducted for 48,822 vacancies in 284 categories.