IRMS: Mother of all Rollbacks Announce, Reverse Repeat!
“Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges… ' proclaims the Clown in the bard’s Twelfth Night , meaning what goes around comes around and so too has time spun back on the Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS). Conceived four years ago to merge eight railway services into a single entity and banish the ghost of departmentalism, the IRMS seemed the future of railway management. Yet, with the cracks in this vision too glaring to ignore, after many flip flops, the government recently seemed to have reversed the course again, opting once more for officer recruitment through the Civil Services Examination (CSE) and Engineering Services Examination (ESE)—a return to old habits under a new guise. I recently wrote that IRMS, often humorously dubbed the Indian Railway Mismanagement Service , has a rather unique purpose—one might call it the ultimate Innovative Redundancy Management Scheme . It keeps the increasingly redundant railway executives in a state of confused bliss, h