Restructuring of Railway Board was a long-pending reform: Chairman

New Delhi: Railway Board Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav has said that the restructuring of Railway Board was a long-pending reform suggested by many reform committees constituted on Railways. The reforms as suggested by various committees from time to time, including Prakash Tandon Committee (1994), have been largely adopted, he added.

Restructuring of Railway Board

Addressing media persons, Yadav said that the idea of restructuring of Railway Board is to provide cohesiveness and consequently better services to passengers and freight customers.  In the new restructured Railway Board, there will be one CRB/CEO and four members on functional basis — Member Infrastructure, Member Rolling Stock & Traction, Member Operation & Business Development and Member Finance.

The plan

Independent Members will be inducted in Railway Board as non-executive Members who will be in advisory role. They will not be involved in day-to-day functioning of Railways. The modalities of restructuring the Railway Board will be decided by an alternative mechanism. The exact number of non-executive Members will be decided by the government.  The idea is to unify all eight services of Indian Railways into one service, namely Indian Railways Management Service to break the departmentalism and make officers work in cohesion for the development of Railways.

'Only Railway officers to be considered for CEO post'

Yadav said that only officers of Indian Railways will be considered for the CEO post and not outsiders. Secondly, he added, career growth of Indian Railways officers is assured. "No officer of Indian Railways shall be at a disadvantage in this new restructured service," Yadav said. He also added that offering apex level to the General Managers is a step to empower them for better coordination with state authorities to take decisions swiftly and independently. This will enable Railway Board to concentrate on policy framing, strategic planning and coordination of zonal railways.

'Railway Board restructuring aimed at removing bottlenecks'

Yadav said that the priority of Indian Railways is to improve infrastructure and remove the bottlenecks.  Indian Railways is aiming to run trains at 160 kmph on Kolkata-Delhi and Delhi-Mumbai corridor. "We are hopeful that 3,000 route kilometres of dedicated freight corridor will be completed by 2021. In the next 10 years, Indian Railways will have an independent dedicated freight corridor on all freight routes. Indian Railways aims to run trains on demand and redevelop stations under PPP mode," Yadav said.

In the last five years, Railways investment has increased three to four times and projects have been prioritised into supercritical and critical to speed up upgradation of infrastructure. The Railways has set a high growth target and to achieve this, nimble and cohesive decision-making is the foremost requirement, Yadav said.