A hesitant step forward
The government has formally moved on the structural changes that it had earlier approved in the Railways. What has caught public attention is the fact that the Railways now has a CEO, as is the practice in the corporate sector. Whereas earlier the Railways was headed by the chairman of the railway board, now the chairman will be called CEO.
The first question is: what is the significance of this move and does it have substance or is it merely a change in nomenclature with things being run in a ‘business as usual’ manner?
Earlier, say, when two members of the board, representing two different services, differed, the matter was set aside and no decision taken. The chairman did not impose a decision which reflected his own viewpoint. Now, as CEO, he will be able to do so. When a CEO, with a mind of his own, knows what needs doing, he will be able to carry it through.
But one overriding reality will not change. Whereas a corporate CEO is answerable to his shareholders, or in a broader sense all the stakeholders, the Railways CEO will remain answerable to the minister above him. Thus, the Railways will remain open to all political directives which have traditionally stood in the way of public sector enterprises being run professionally. The governance structure above the CEO will remain unchanged.
The change will be that a dynamic CEO will be able to set right to an extent the governance structure below him to the extent that his boss or bosses (those manning the PMO, for example) allow him to. Hence, the first reality is: don’t expect drastic changes to come soon, but hope that with an enabling structure in place, things will slowly change for the better.
The other change at the top is that the size of the railway board has been reduced. Now, it will comprise five members, including the chairman and CEO. Three posts at the board level have been eliminated. Is this a big thing? The long-term hope of those who looked for a reorganisation at the top was that instead of the board being structured along service lines, it would be structured along customer segments. For example, there would be a member for freight and a member for passengers.
But that has not happened. There will now be a single member in charge of operations and business development. There will be another member in charge of traction and rolling stock and a member (finance), as in the past. Is this a change for the better? It is difficult to say.
The really big change that has been formalised is the merger of all the railways services into a single Indian Railway Management Service. The bane of the Railways earlier was ‘departmentalism’, members of different services putting the interests of their own fiefdoms foremost. An end to this should come as a result of there being a single service.
But the officers are against the merger and the process of merging the services is likely to be a long-drawn-out affair. What kind of an animal will finally emerge, and whether the disaffection over the fitments will be extensive, is not known. When things settle down, we will know, but the Railways is in for a period of uncertainty.
However, action on one front, which is vital for the future profitable survival of the Railways — cutting down its staff strength — is missing. Over half of what the Railways earns goes in meeting staff and pension expenses. It also has major plans to bring in new technology which will improve safety and passenger comfort and should also raise productivity. So, more should be done by the same numbers or fewer.
The Railways has itself, in the past, been thinking along these lines. The ‘Vision 2020’ document of 2009 set out the goal of reducing staff strength by 1 per cent a year through natural wastage (retirements) and not filling vacancies. But the atmospherics in recent years have been of massive recruitments. In 2018, prior to the elections the next year, the Railways spoke of bringing on board 90,000 fresh hands, touted as the world’s largest recruitment drive. This was justified on the grounds that there were 1.29 lakh vacancies in the ‘safety cadres’ when there is no such cadre in the Railways, and declaring a job to be safety-related is an administrative one.
Then, in the next year, the minister announced that the Railways would provide over four lakh jobs over the next two years. Most recently, the Railways announced plans to recruit up to 1.4 lakh hands through online processes in view of the raging pandemic. How is this number made up? Over 35,000 will be non-technical hands like guards and clerks, over a thousand stenographers and teachers, and over a lakh ‘level one’ people like maintainers and pointsmen.
Yes, having a CEO who can hand down decisions makes sense; yes, merging cadres to end ‘departmentalism’ makes even better sense, but giving the Railways an image of being a munificent job provider instead of a lean and fit profit-making organisation raises the question as to how far ground realities will change at the end of the day.
