NEW DELHI: A delegation of railway engineers representing Indian Railways Service of Engineer Officers Association (IRSEOA) led by its Vice President A.K Sachan met MoS PMO, Dr Jitendra Singh and sought his intervention for timely promotions and parity in promotion to higher posts in the Ministry of Railways.
While expressing gratitude to Singh for his kind intervention through Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) which helped in expediting the cadre restructuring proposals of 8 Group “A” services of Indian Railways, the members of delegation sought a review of the DoPT decision which had allegedly led to cut-down in the posts of HAG+, HAG and SAG level selectively for IRSE cadre. They said, IRSE cadre is already lagging behind most of the other cadres of Indian Railways by three years in HAG and SAG promotions, as a result of which, in IRSE cadre they get HAG and SAG promotions after 34 and 25 years of service respectively, as compared to 26 and 18 years respectively for most of the other services in Government of India.
In a memorandum submitted to the minister, the representatives of the Railway Engineers pointed out that railways is a multi-disciplinary organisation having eight Group A organised services and therefore, for maintaining operational harmony within the organization, it is necessary that inter-cadre parity is maintained. They also complained that even though, as per DOPT’s monograph on cadre review, the promotional norms for SAG and HAG are 17 and 25 years respectively, the IRSE officers are getting promotions much later which has led to demoralisation in the services.
Emphasising the need for comprehensive review of the cadre by DoPT, the members of delegation requested Singh to personally intervene for recalling back the proposal from Ministry of Finance and revise it by applying, what they described as, a uniform yardstick.
Singh assured the members of delegation that he will ask the concerned officers in DOPT to study the inputs offered by them and come out with an objective view on the same.
Besides A.K Sachan, the other members of delegation included Rajiv Choudhary, V.P Dudeja, V.P Singh and A.K Khandelwal.