The Ministry of Railways and the Railway Board is certainly busy with the proposed running of more trains from Monday, but in the meantime, it is also pushing ahead with its reforms agenda of transforming the working mode of its officers and staff in tune with the restructuring of various wings. The RB has announced the constitution of a eight-member high powered committee to look into various issues pertaining to the re-skilling of the staff.
The members of the committee are principal executive directors and executive directors of engineering services, traffic & transportation, signal & telecommunication, finance, projects and others with an executive director being the convenor. The panel formed more than a fortnight ago has been tasked with identifying the cadre who can be trained and used for multi-skills, the scope and details of the kind of skills to be imparted to the chosen railway officials, fixation of seniority in the merged cadre, pay grades in the merged cadre and medical classification.
The Railways had initiated a massive exercise of having a unified Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS) in the place of the current eight services, including engineering, rolling stock, traffic, finance and signal & telecommunications, among others. Railway Board Chairman V.K. Yadav had said that this became imperative to remove the “departmentalism” mindset in the top echelons and have a clear cut strategy for policy decisions in view of the massive investments expected under Public, Private Partnership (PPP) mode.
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The Railway Board communication has stated that the committee can take the assistance of Director General of National Academy of Indian Railways (NAIR) while formulating and finalising the training modules for the merged cadre. A manpower planning department has been made as the nodal branch for functioning of the committee from New Delhi. This particular branch will supervise the submission of the recommendations, implementation, answering any queries raised in different quarters and so on. The committee has been directed to submit its recommendations within a month.