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Railway Board is really powerful

Last Updated 04 May 2013, 20:34 IST

India’s Railway Board is vested with the powers to oversee and manage what is ranked among the world’s top five railroad networks and one of the largest employers, with an estimated 14 lakh people on its rolls.

The board, including its chairman comprises seven members, each entrusted with a specific area of operation, reporting directly to the Railways minister. The members oversee areas related to mechanical, traffic, engineering, electrical and staff, besides a finance commissioner.

“It is the highest decision making body of the Railways, which approves all the policies and projects pertaining to the Indian Railways,” Indian Railways spokesperson Anil Kumar Saxena said.

The Railway Board was constituted in 1901 and its powers were formalised four years later. The officers today are members of the Indian Railway Personnel Services – a Class A civil service under the Union Public Service Commission.
The seven-member board is powerful financially as well.

All decisions pertaining to its large budget, pegged at a whopping Rs 63,363 crore (Rs 633.63 billion or $11.5 billion) for the current fiscal, is routed through it.

In fact, Railways is the only ministry that has been having a separate annual budget since 1920, long before independence in 1947, given its crucial contribution to the economy and the role it plays in nation-building.

The network is spread over 64,000 km with 7,083 stations, to ferry 2.3 crore travellers and 26.5 lakh tonnes of goods daily on 12,000 passenger and 7,000 freight trains.

To ensure that the Railways is able grow, while also remaining financially healthy, an expert committee under tech evangelist Sam Pitroda, also the prime minister’s advisor on public information, infrastructure and innovations, had made several recommendations.

“The structure of the Indian Railways has remained largely unchanged for decades and it remains a functionally oriented institution that is organised around its cadres, instead of around its businesses or customers,” the committee had observed.

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(Published 04 May 2013, 20:34 IST)

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