The Gazette of India, published on 9 October, conveyed the President’s approval of the amendments to the Indian Railway Management Service (Group ‘A’) Rules, 2022. The amendment for direct recruitment to IRMS is to lay down that this be done through both the UPSC’s Civil Services Examination and Engineering Services Examination instead of only the former.
IRMS probationary officers at the Indian Railways Institute of Transportation Management (IRITM) Lucknow, heaved a sigh of relief at the amendment along with many stakeholders in Rail Bhavan and the field units. The restoration of sourcing the officers for technical wings of Railways from the Engineering Services Examination (ESE) and for the non-technical wings through the Civil Services Examination (CSE) may be termed ‘revenir a son point de depart (return to the starting point)’.
The 2022 decision to conduct IRMS recruitment through CSE alone was always fraught with complications and uncertainties for aspirants. Probationary officers of 2022, 2023, and 2024 batches who opted for IRMS and are presently under training remain apprehensive about their service allocations. During these three years, the IRMS was supposed to feed the officers to all Railway services, technical and non-technical.
Induction to both streams could however be only possible through significant changes in the CSE pattern itself. The 2022 rule evidently resulted in practically no recruitment to technical/engineering services of Railways and non-allocation of cadres/streams to those recruited through CSE. The rule has now been amended and the age-old system of recruitment of Railway officers from both ESE and CSE has been reinstated.
Chronology of IRMS recruitment
Before analysing how such a situation developed, understanding the chronology of events is essential. Since 2014, the government had embarked upon major reforms across ministries. Indian Railways (IR), too, underwent three major reforms from 2015 to 2018: mobilising extra-budgetary resources for project financing, merging the Railway budget with the general Budget, and some structural and organisational changes.
The first two of these reforms were in place by 2017. For suggesting organisational reforms, the Bibek Debroy Committee had submitted its report by March 2015.
The report suggested a certain reorganisation of the Railway Board on functional lines and recommended that recruitment of officers be continued through CSE and ESE, both of which were conducted by the UPSC. It was also recommended that a new service, namely the Indian Railway General Management Service (IRGMS) be created and officers from both streams be selected for the same albeit after the middle management level. It was also suggested that officers should be rotated within their groups to acquire wider experience and expertise.
Successive Railway conclaves convened by the ministry in 2017 and 2019 had deliberated on structural reforms and reorganisation of services to break the “silo” culture. The unification of services and organisational restructuring of the Railway Board had also been discussed.
On 24 December 2019, the Union cabinet approved the unification of Group ‘A’ services of Railways into a central service called IRMS and the reorganisation of the Railway Board on functional lines. Railway Board Order number 64 of 2020 specified the board’s revised composition. A subsequent Gazette notification from February 2022 laid down the principal rules for IRMS, including the provision that recruitment to IRMS (eight Group ‘A’ services) would be carried out through CSE by UPSC.
This became a crucial stage in Railway reforms. There was not much clarity about the allocation of the stream of services and training of the officers recruited through CSE. It is gathered that about 112 officers from the 2022 batch are currently undergoing training at IRITM and another group of 84 IRMS officers of the 2023 CSE batch have also joined training.
All these probationary officers were selected through CSE. It is not yet clear whether all of them would be allocated non-technical services—such as the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), the Indian Railway Accounts Service (IRAS), and the Indian Railway Personnel Service (IRPS)—or would some of them also be inducted in engineering wings, per the original mandate. Probationary officers also made representations seeking consideration of the Railway Board in this regard.
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All’s well that…
With this context, the decision to revert to the old system of recruitment —a decision that’s late by three years—should be seen as course correction by the Railway Board. It now appears that those already recruited through CSE will all be allocated civil or non-technical services in Railways. Apparently, a huge backlog of vacancies would have accumulated for technical/engineering services, since no recruitment through ESE took place during the last three years.
To salvage this situation, the Railway Board sent a proposal to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to permit the sourcing of officers from ESE and CSE both as was done before the creation of IRMS. The proposal was approved through a DoPT letter dated 5 October. A few hours later, the Railway Board requested the Secretary of the Department of Telecommunications (nodal ministry for ESE indents) to include 225 vacancies for IRMS (technical) recruitment through ESE-2025 being conducted by the UPSC. A Gazette notification was issued on 9 October, detailing these amendments to the rules.
It is also worth noting that cabinet approval in 2019 had been given for the creation of IRMS, making it amply clear that the creation of a new service shall be done in consultation with DoPT and UPSC. It is, however, unclear as to how officers recruited through CSE could have been inducted into the Railways’ technical/engineering wings.
In the last three years, the induction to IRMS through CSE alone not only created career uncertainty for the selected CSE applicants but also led to crucial technical/engineering positions remaining vacant.
Various committees in the past had recommended restructuring and unification of services, albeit with caveats. The Bibek Debroy model for IRGMS was by and large adopted as IRMS. However, its recommendation to retain both CSE and ESE was not accepted. Its suggestion that officers in technical and non-technical groupings should remain in their specialised fields for the initial 10 to 15 years and thereafter be selected for IRGMS to fill General Administration posts, is still doable. This report perhaps needs to be revisited by the Railway Board.
DoPT’s approval of the Railway Board’s proposal to conduct IRMS recruitment through ESE and CSE also comes with directions that it shall not, in any way, be in contravention to the cabinet decision of 24 December 2019 and that any changes in the recruitment rules shall be made in consultation with DoPT and UPSC. With this, IR has yet another opportunity to streamline the ‘recruitment to retirement’ career ladder for officers who have the onerous task of managing one of the largest railway systems in the world.
The Railway Board’s course correction by way of reverting to the earlier CSE and ESE finally confirms the French saying, ‘Tout est bien qui finit bien (All’s well that ends well).’
Mohammad Jamshed is a former Member (Traffic) Railway Board and former member of the Central Administrative Tribunal. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
Recruitment to the officer cadre of the Indian Railways should only be through the Engineering Services Exam (ESE) of the UPSC.
One can easily teach the art and science of management to an engineer. In fact, an overwhelming majority of students selected at IIMs and other top management institutes are engineers.
However, one cannot teach engineering to a non-technical person who would have qualified through the CSE.
The Indian Railways is a highly technical organisation and requires solid technological background and understanding which only an engineer would have. An Arts/Commerce student will never be able to master the complex electro-mechanical machinery operated by the Railways.
The govt’s decision to recruit solely through the CSE was a blunder. Instead, the recruitment should be through ESE.