Railway employees entrusted with doing household chores of senior officials will be entrusted with the maintenance of railway tracks, their original responsibility.
The move by the Railways comes at a time when the carrier has come in for criticism following a spate of recent train derailments with employees originally intended for maintenance and safety work assigned to household chores.
A Mail Today report says as part of one of the first reforms by new Railway Board chairman Ashwin Lohani, Group-D employees including gangmen and track men, would now resume with inspecting railway tracks and conducting maintenance work.
The employees, who are said to do tasks like grocery shopping, cleaning utensils and clothes and picking up kids of senior Railway officials, will come as a welcome relief for the Group-D employees.
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Sources told the tabloid that close to nearly ten thousand of these employees will resume the jobs they were intended to do, including a round-the-clock inspection of railway tracks.
“The move aims to reorganise the workforce and also strengthen the railway safety mechanism. With a large number of employees back to the tracks, the situation is likely to improve,” a Railway official was quoted saying.
Gangmen, like track men, are responsible for the safety of tracks. They’re responsible for track maintenance and running of trains with 12-hour-shifts while on duty.
The move by Lohani comes after the resignation of A.K. Mittal, the former head of the Railway Board, after two accidents in five days in Uttar Pradesh.
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Around 100 passengers were injured as ten bogies of the Kaifiyat Express derailed in the Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh, four days after 13 coaches of the Utkal Express went off the rails near Khatauli in UP, killing 22 people and injuring 156.
In the last five years, nearly 53 per cent of the 586 train accidents have been caused by derailments. The worst such accident occurred in November 2016 when 150 passengers were killed when the Indore-Patna Express derailed near Kanpur.
With Agency Inputs
