After several rail officials were nabbed in a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) trap pertaining to cases related to jobs, promotions in the Indian Railway networks, the Railway Board in a high level meeting on Wednesday decided that all departmental promotion examinations for the 13 Lakh rail employees will be done by the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) via centralised examination through Computer Based Test (CBT) aptitude.
Sources in the railways said all zonal railways will have to prepare a calendar for the examination and all examinations will be conducted on the basis of a calendar only. “This has been decided after a long experience of transparent, fair, and highly appreciated examinations conducted by RRB in recent years,” sources said.
A day earlier in a massive crackdown the CBI arrested 26 railway officials, including a senior divisional electrical engineer of East Cental Railway for allegedly leaking papers of a departmental examination and seized Rs 1.17 crore cash during its raids. The railway officials were arrested on Monday night for allegedly leaking papers of examination for the elevation to posts of chief loco pilot at Mughal Sarai, the agency said, adding the exam was to be conducted on Tuesday.
The arrest came just a fortnight after the central probe agency arrested five railway officers, including two of the Indian Railway Personnel Service (IRPS) posted in Vadodara Division, for alleged bribery in favouring candidates in departmental examination, officials said on Wednesday.
As of now, there used to be internal vacancies and promotions were ‘fixed’, which had a huge nexus from top officers to other stakeholders, making it a huge racket and cartelisation for the stakeholders.
The decision was taken after the days’ meeting reviewed how the RRB is used to conduct examination without any complaints, with all the transparency.
“From 2015 to till date more than seven Crores candidates have been examined through computer based tests without any paper leakage, impersonation, remote log-in, and use of spy devices,” explained a railway board official.
The process involves selection of exam conducting agency through an open tender will have to go strict auditing checklist for all the available facilities like toilet outside not allowed, 100 percent CCTV coverage and recording to be done two hours pre-exam and one hour post exams.
The SOPs involves IP based CCTV surveillance for better resolution, reliable and uninterrupted connection; isolation from commercial and other residential area. “All mouse and key clicks to be recorded with time stamp for audit purpose. Information about city of exam to be disclosed 10 days before the actual date of examination while venue/centre of examination has to be made available only four days before the exam.
Exam centre will be allotted through a computerized and randomised generation avoiding manual intervention,” said the official. The conducting team and the exam centre personnel will get the information about the candidate just two hours before the examination. The board decided that the question paper has to be in highly encrypted form (256-bit encryption) and last minute decryption will happen only when the candidate actually logs in. Finally multiple layers of invigilation will monitor the entire exercise to make it fool pro
