The announcement by the Railways Minister, Sheikh Rashid, to fill 10,000 jobs out of the 23,000 vacant in the ministry on an urgent basis has evoked mixed response from people. Some fear that these jobs would be distributed on political basis while others believe it is the right time to overcome the shortage of qualified staff in different departments.

In the past, political governments have been giving jobs to their supporters in the department regardless of whether they were qualified or not. Once in, they could not be easily removed due to the trade union’s pressure.

The government claims the recruitment process will be transparent. It will start from hiring of guards and drivers. While a final plan on recruitment is yet to be announced, the government has identified 2,031 vacant regular posts of different categories in basic pays scales, ranging from 1 to 11. These posts are vacant in departments, including civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, transportation, commercial, signal engineering, telecommunication engineering and workshop division. The ministry plans to fill these within this year.

The question is whether Railways has the right person for the right job or is there mismanagement because of unjust recruitments? Similarly, the claim about the department being overstaffed is challenged by those who think there is shortage of technical hands but an abundant supply of people who can do general jobs. For example, they claim, the number of peons, helpers and domestic servants is far higher than required.

A former Railways official who does not want to be named, says the real downfall of Railways started in the 1970s when the focus of the government shifted to the road network and the first five-year plan also supported this shift. The situation aggravated with the formation of the National Logistics Cell (NLC) that captured goods business of Pakistan Railways and in a way affected its viability. The official explains that due to this development the staff became excess and there was less work.

He adds that despite the department being in a bad state of affairs, political parties kept on hiring new recruits, most of whom did not have the required skills. These staffers would get salaries and perks but they were not bound to turn up and could somehow get their attendance marked.

The burden of salaries and pensions is too huge for the department to bear. Despite incurring losses it cannot lay off people because of the resistance it might face. So the department follows a policy of attrition under which the jobs that have become redundant are not filled when the people retire.

A research report titled, "Pakistan Railways at the Verge of Collapse: A Case Study" by a team of researchers at the University of Karachi also hints at this situation. It points out that "since the trains are seldom used, most of the employees sit at home and receive salaries illegitimately. This situation is further aggravated by the blurred definition of the roles, duties and responsibilities related to job which ultimately results in redundancy of job duties, wastage of time and other resources and reluctance of employees in executing their task sincerely."

The reports says with the emphasis shifting towards road networks, investment fell sharply in the rail sector, resulting in deterioration of infrastructure and failure to improve and expand, it led to the depletion in both quantity and quality of the rolling stock. This made a lot of staff redundant.

An interesting statement released lately by the minister was about recruiting people in Railways by way of lottery. This statement evoked a lot of criticism from people.

However, Fazl -e - Wahid, a senior office-bearer of Railways Collective Bargaining Agent (CBA), says the rationale of the government is that sometimes there are thousands of applications against a single job and finding the right person is a Herculean task. So, in order to simplify and speed up things they opt for the lottery process. Another benefit of this method of recruitment, he says, is that one can evade pressure from politicians, union members, senior bureaucrats, etc, to recruit people.

Wahid says this method of recruitment will be applied only for filling the posts for basic pay scales, from 1 to 5 only. For the remaining vacancies, there will be a criteria and an extensive process of hiring.

To have the break-up of existing jobs in different categories and percentages, we can analyse the data of June 2017. Railways had 73,276 employees on its pay rolls. Out of this, 20,151 (27.5 per cent) were employed in the civil engineering department, which maintains track and buildings; 21,430 (29.25 per cent) in the mechanical department which repairs and maintains the rolling stock; 10,094 (13.77 per cent) in the transportation department which controls guards, station masters and yard staff and 2,911 (3.97 per cent) in the commercial department which controls passenger ticket offices, freight depots and luggage.

Wahid says mechanisation and automation have also had an adverse effect on jobs. For example, earlier there were around 40 people in the die-cutting department but now with the installation of an automatic machine most of them are not required. One or two persons are enough to operate this machine and get the same output that 40 people would give while working manually.

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In this context, a report prepared by A F Ferguson & Co Chartered accountants on the directions of the Supreme Court of Pakistan points out several anomalies in the recruitment system. For example, it points out that staff strength exceeds sanctioned strength in certain grades and in some cases this difference is glaring.

Another finding of the report is that out of the total staff strength 0f 74,195 as in June 2017, the data of 25,000 employees had been entered in the payroll management system. Other than headquarters, there is no historical payroll data available in the system. Non-availability of employee-wise payroll data for each division significantly impairs the utility of an automated payroll solution. Effectively all records are manual and fragmented.

The report also establishes that there were unapproved recruitments of employees from 2012-13 to 2014-15, recruitments in unapproved categories in 2015-16 and 2016-17, recruitments in excess of approval from the ministry of Railways and existence of duplicate/similar records in recruitment during 2016 and 2017.