Indian Railways is all set have a completely digitised Human Resource Information System (HRIS) before the financial year end where details of each employee will be available on the dashboard. An e-office platform making it a paperless platform and another digitised software system to have an online clearance of engineering drawings are also to be in place in the coming months.
“We have never had an exclusive software for HR management. It is 90% ready and will be operational by March 2021 nationwide. It will also help in reskilling and retraining our staff,” said Railway Board chairman, Vinod Kumar Yadav.
Pilot successful
The e-office concept, which started in South Central Railway (SCR) when Mr Yadav was the general manager of the zone, will now be implemented across all divisions soon. Similarly, the e-drawing approval systems pilot project has been successful, so this too will be taken nationwide, he revealed.
Even as the focus will be on capacity augmentation for the next five years, the employees, too, will be re-trained to handle the technological upgrade of the infrastructure with ‘multi-skilling’ and ‘redeployment’ from redundant areas to the critical ones. “A lot of technology change has taken place in railways and we need to retrain our personnel to bring more efficiency into the systems,” he said, in an exclusive interaction.
The chairman said Indian Railways being an “old and huge” organisation, there was bound to be resistance to the changes being attempted. “We have been talking, motivating and listening to them. They are also understanding the need for reforms. More than the work force, it is the officers who need to lead the change. I have been telling them that unless there is growth in railways there cannot be career growth,” he explained.
In fact, the planned major upheaval of cadre with unified Indian Railway Management Service (IRMS) got a break because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Union Cabinet has cleared the cadre restructuring. We will start from where we left and it is going to be big reform. Recruitment to all the eight railway services like IRTS, IRAS, etc., have been stopped for the year and we will be finalising the recruitment process soon,” said Mr. Yadav.
Shah at the helm
Home Minister Amit Shah is heading the Cabinet Ministers’ group looking into the cadre restructuring while Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gaube is heading the committee of secretaries.
It has also been decided to introduce more courses in the National Institute of Railway Technology in association with the universities in the US and the UK, besides tying up with Indian School of Business, IITs and IIMs to train the manager level officers.
“We are also training our trainers of various railway training institutes and making use of the Original Equipment Suppliers for reskilling and multi-skilling of our technical staff at the lower levels in a coordinated manner,” added the chairman.
