Good railwaymen get a chance!

 

There is a view that the top management cadres of Indian Railways (IR) are in a mess due to half-baked and unimplemented reforms initiated by the previous rail regime without much sense of purpose. A large number of top posts of IR, particularly those of Members of the Board and General Managers (GMs), lie vacant. In the middle of this chaos, came the announcement that all future induction of officers would be through a common examination and the successful candidates would join an integrated service called, Indian Railway Management Service (IRMS). As expected, there was more criticism than support for the move. I also wrote about it in Hindu BusinessLine, 10^th March 2022, with some reservations about the move to have a single cadre at the entry stage, although I had always opined that a unified cadre at top level was indeed a crying need.

 

No one can downplay the need for a positive resolution of the age-old problem of acute departmentalism and fragmentary working of its cadres on IR. In any case, the die of entry-level IRMS is cast. After taking over the Rail Ministry nearly nine months back, the present minister has had to deal with a deep financial crisis, attributable partly to the pandemic, but also IR’s inherent problems and lethargy. One would have thought that having got the notification for recruitment of 150 IRMS officers through the Civil Service Examination issued, the goal of unification of its eight existing cadres would take a backseat. Inaction on the issue of merging the existing cadres would be quite understandable as the expectations of different cadres appear irreconcilable. Bringing these services on a common platform based on inter-se seniority would cause a serious imbalance between engineers, who join at a younger age through Indian Engineering Service examination vis-à-vis others who join at an older age through Civil Services examination. With many announcements and declarations to manage, some of which border on unachievable hypes, this unification exercise would be in limbo.

 

Not entirely so. The Minister has deftly pulled out an unfamiliar rabbit out of his hat. The ministry decided that officers from 1983 to 1986 batches currently serving in Level 15 from the eight organised Group-A services (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Traffic, Accounts, Personnel, Signal and Stores) would be eligible to apply for empanelment in Level 16 of IRMS and the officers so empanelled would form the pool for the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet to pick suitable officers for posting on the 29 posts of GMs of zones, production units and others.

 

Senior officers in Level 15, or HAG, still in service on a cut-off date, irrespective of the number of years of service left, can apply, describing five contributions to the organisation in their lifetime and five contributions that the officer would make, in the three positions that he or she is aspiring for, in a given time-frame. The selection process for empanelment would have officers going through a process of self-assessment, including an Emotional Quotient test, multi-source assessment (peers, seniors, etc) and scrutiny of annual confidential reports. This new system largely takes away any advantage or disadvantage of the age factor.

 

An expert panel comprising retired Board Members, GMs, Additional Members, Principal Departmental Heads and retired Secretaries to GoI shall evaluate the applications and present it to a Departmental Promotion Committee. The latter will include Secretary/DOP&T; Chairman & CEO, IR and one Secretary-level  non-railway officer and make an overall recommendations for empanelment.

 

This, friends, is revolutionary, it is not an old wine in a new bottle but a nouveau vin, a wine with a novel body, tannin and terroir. In government service, they say, horses and  donkeys move up at the same speed and to upset this applecart of sarkari (government) comfort zone of entitled and universal convenience is a knockout.

 

IR has seven posts in Level 17, the next level after GM, which are, Chairman Railway Board cum CEO, Members and Board Director Generals. A similar process would be employed for selection to these posts as well, with an important caveat that those in Level 15, subject to their still being in service on a cut-off date, would also be eligible to apply for empanelment. This also is transformational and stupendous. In a lighter vein, it is tantamount to ‘double promotion’ in schools of yore, reserved for brilliant students.  My uncle Chachā Ghālib has covered this new spunk for IR and its officers:

 

Kyā farz hai ki sab ko mile ek sā javāb

aao na ham bhī sair kareñ koh-e-tūr kī

(farz: obligation, statute,  koh-e-tūr: Mount Tūr, where Moses received The Ten Commandments. Is there an obligation that all would get a similar answer, like the one Moses got? Come on, let's also us take a stroll around Mount Tūr or Mount Sinai)

 

So, do I say that this new system is better than the existing one? Yes! And why? In the present system, officers can work out, with a reasonable accuracy, right at the beginning of their careers, the level to which they would rise based on their date of birth, as the system provides for yearly empanelment of officers from Level 15 based on inter-se seniority and their balance years in service on a cut-off date. This is detrimental in a double whammy; those who are likely to go up may decide to tread cautiously and not take any transformational or tricky decisions which can invite Vigilance complaints and controversies and those not likely to rise to the top may decide to take it easy without much incentive to perform. There sure are self-motivated officers as exceptions but the outcome of mediocre Chaltā hai (everything acceptable!) performance is more common. In the new system, the top posts have been opened to a much larger pool of officers.

 

Today, the officers who join IRTS, IRAS and IRPS at an older age through Civil Services examination are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis engineers who join at a younger age through Indian Engineering Service examination. A detrimental fallout of this has been that officers of these key departments do not rise to become GM; in my early service days some of the finest GMs came from IRTS as they had great insight into the nitty-gritty of railway operations and, therefore, the bread and butter of railways. The new system gives a chance to such officers.

 

There is another spin off benefit. Since 2016, those empanelled in Level 16 but not posted as they did not have 2-year residual service on the date of vacancy, were given the benefit of Level 16 pay and pension benefits once their junior(s) getting posted. It follows that those who missed empanelment on age grounds should also get this relief but it was not so addressed. Such officers would now, not only be eligible for entering the panel, but also get the Level 16 pay and pension benefits, even if they finally do not get posted in Level 16. This possibility should help boost the morale of Level 14/15 officers to excel and standout.

 

There would be criticism that the retired officers in the evaluation committee may show favouritism and pick and choose. Perhaps, to some extent. But no system in government can be rid of such aberrations and this cannot depreciate the inherent superiority of the new system over the archaic one in place today. I will digress once more as I also have reservation about this committee of retired officers and their ability to rise above their pristine thinking and biases; perhaps a greater number of some non-railway members would be better but, for the nonce, merely remembering the great poet Habib Jalib, and wondering if those who thought themselves to be God can make an objective judgment:

 

Tum se pahle vo jo ik shaḳhs yahāñ taḳht-nashīñ thā

us ko bhī apne ḳhudā hone pe itnā hī yaqīñ thā

(shaḳhs: man, taḳht-nashīñ: king on the throne, yaqīñ: belief. The one who sat on this throne before you all had a belief that he was God)

 

And now a bit about Emotional Intelligence. Our government, and so IR, still has a feudal culture and senior officers quite often encourage obsequious behaviour from their juniors, lost in the vanity of their self-importance. Any push to deflate this pompous air should be welcome. Leaders should be able to withstand all the emotional waves, their own and of others, to lead with empathy rather than being, in the words of the bard's Hamlet, in the eponymous play, ‘passion’s slave”. Let the officers be judged on this attitude, it is a beginning and after all the quality is natural to many but can also be acquired, so I quote Polonius, somewhat tongue in cheek, as he tries to teach his son Laertes in the same play with his long fatherly advice:

 

“…This above all,—to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

 

So friends, I welcome this initiative, for whatever my opinion is worth, and hope that IR would be able to nurture a more committed and empathic leadership.

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