Why in News?

• The Cabinet has recently decided to merge all central service cadres of Railways officers into a single service.
• It has also approved the trimming of the Railway Board from a nine-member board to a five-member one.

What are the decisions taken?

• IRMS - All the central service cadres of Railways officers will be merged into a single Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS).
• Now, any eligible officer could occupy any post, irrespective of training and specialisation, since they all will belong to IRMS.
• Board - The five members of the Board, other than a Chairman-cum-CEO, will be the Members Infrastructure, Finance, Rolling Stock, Track, and Operations and Business Development.
• The Board will also have independent Members, who will be industry experts with at least 30 years of experience, but in non-executive roles, only attending Board meetings.
• The move has led to protests from serving civil servants, prompting the Railway Board to reach out to them to allay their concerns.

What is the present system like?

• The Indian Railways is governed by a pool of officers, among whom engineers are recruited through the Indian Engineering Service Examination, and civil servants through the Civil Services Examination.
• The civil servants are in the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), Indian Railway Accounts Service (IRAS) and Indian Railway Personnel Service (IRPS).
• The engineers are in five technical service cadres: Indian Railway Services of Engineers (IRSE), Mechanical Engineers (IRSME), Electrical Engineers (IRSEE), and Signal Engineers (IRSSE); and the Indian Railway Stores Service (IRSS).

Why was the reform needed?

• The government wants to end inter-departmental rivalries, which it says have been hindering growth for decades.
• Several committees including the Bibek Debroy committee (2015) have noted that “departmentalism” is a major problem in the system.
• The Debroy report recommended merging of all services to create two distinct services: Technical and Logistics.
• But it did not say how to merge the existing officers.
• A separate exam under the Union Public Service Commission is proposed to be instituted in 2021 to induct IRMS officers.

Why are officers opposed to the move?

• The opposition started with a proposal to merge officers in the eight services to prepare a common seniority list and a general pool of posts.
• Those protesting the government’s decision say that the merger is unscientific and against established norms.
• They say that the proposal is trying to merge two fundamentally dissimilar entities, with multiple disparities.
• The civil servants come from all walks of life after clearing the Civil Services Examination, not like the engineers who usually sit for the Engineering Service examination right after getting a degree.
• Various studies have noted that engineers join the Railways around the age of 22-23, while the civil servants join around 26, barring exceptions.
• The age difference starts to pinch at the later stages of their careers, when higher-grade posts are fewer.
• There are more engineers than civil servants.

How pronounced is this skew?

• The Railways have legitimised a system wherein an officer with a certain number of years left in service will be considered eligible for general-management higher posts.
• The most important of these posts is the General Manager post, who heads zones and production units.
• An officer, irrespective of seniority in his batch and acumen, requires at least two years of service left for being eligible for GM.
• The civil servants have often found themselves at a disadvantage since they don’t have the required service tenure left.
• In the fields where the Railways are actually operated, the share of civil servants in junior-to-middle levels is over 40%, but in higher management, it is around 16-17%

What will change with the restructure?

• In inter-departmental seniority, problems arise when different services compete for posts that are open to all like those of Divisional Railway Managers (DRMs), GMs and the Chairman Railway Board.
• If all present cadres are merged and higher departmental posts become open to all, engineers may end up occupying most posts, if not all.
• Another aspect is the suitability of jobs.
• The move emerges from the belief that while non-technical specialists cannot do technical jobs, technocrats can do both.
• The counter-argument is that civil servants in government, by virtue of the screening process and subsequent training, possess acumen and skills that go beyond academic specialisation.

How did the Railways get here?

• Departmental posts are ring-fenced; promotions happen within each department from officers of that service.
• A department needs a constant supply of posts in higher grades to keep promoting its seniors so that the juniors keep getting timely promotions.
• In the Railways, this has happened either organically when the government restructured the cadres and created new posts at intervals of several years, or through the execution of projects.
• For execution of each project, departments could create temporary “work-charged” posts, funded by the particular project for itself.
• Departments would seek more projects since the by-product was more work-charged posts and that meant more promotional avenues for the department’s officers.
• In the cadre-restructuring exercise, overseen by the Cabinet and the Cabinet Secretary, work-charged posts have been banned.
• But a majority of the “temporary” posts were absorbed in regular cadres.

What happens next?

• The current demand is for two distinct services instead of one - A civil services, and one that encompasses all engineering specialisations.
• The logic is that functionally, departments will continue to exist through various technical and non-technical specialisations, so merging them will not end departmentalism per se.
• The government has on record assured all existing officers that no one’s seniority will be hampered and promotion prospects will be protected.
• The protests are gathering momentum.
• Amid all these protests, one concern among the higher-ups is that the actual job of safely running trains 24/7 must not get neglected.