Seeking to put the house in order, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has set about getting first hand knowledge of the functioning, problems and issues related to the national transporter, grappling with tragedies like the Utkal Express derailment and Elphinstone Foot Overbridge (FOB) stampede.
On Tuesday, Goyal conducted a marathon six-hour meeting that stretched till 2 am on Wednesday as he huddled with about 80-odd officials, including Railway Board members and General Managers of Zones and PSUs/PSEs under the Railway Ministry. It was the second such lengthy meeting in less than a week that Goyal chaired, with the first one being at Mumbai after the FOB tragedy.
Though Goyal instructed the participants of the meeting not to divulge any proceedings or deliberations of the late night meeting to anyone including the media, sources said that the Railway Minister talked tough and sought to know one by one from the officials the core problems of the zones, functioning of the network and significantly, the role and operational structure of many Railway PSUs.
The Managing Directors and GMs of Railway's PSUs like Dedicated Freight Corridor, IRCON, CONCOR, RITES, Rail Vikas Nigam, Central Railside Warehosuing, CRIS and Railtel among others were present. The Minister sought to understand whether PSUs with similar work nature like RITES, IRCON and RDSO, CRIS and Railtel, CONCOR and CRW could be merged for better functioning.
The in-camera meeting started at around 8 pm and continued till 2 am with the focus being more on safety issues. Goyal asked the top rail officials to express unhesitatingly their requirements for the improvement of rail operations particularly passenger services and amenities. The role and tenure and the decisions taken during Goyal's two predecessors also came under scanner in the free-wheeling discussion.
"The Minister tried to understand all facets of the Indian Railways and most of things he was not aware of. He was bit surprised by the bureaucratic set-up of the Rrailways as an organisation and indicated that such a huge bureaucracy with no coordination between departments like operations, mechanical, electrical, rolling stock and the related PSEs causes hindrances and red-tapism. He vowed to look into this aspect at priority. He also talked about the several Class I services like IRSME, IRTS, IRPS and IRAS. He pondered over how it can be streamlined into two services, merely technical and non-technical," said a senior official present in the meeting.