New Delhi: Indian Railways is gearing up to adopt a slew of austerity measures from a freeze on creation of new posts to shifting outsourced activities to CSR funds, in a view of the serious dent in its earnings this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The financial commissioner of Railways wrote a letter, dated June 19, to General Managers of all zones while mentioning that the traffic earnings of the national transporter have been dropped by 58 per cent at the end of May 2020 as compared to the previous years, due to the nationwide lockdown.
"Railways have been mandated by the government to meet all their revenue expenses including a pension from own receipt. The coronavirus-induced lockdown is however likely to adversely impact the budgeted earnings target of the current year. There is a need to explore new areas of Expenditure control and enhancement of earnings," the letter stated.
It also mentioned that such measures were already announced in 2017 by then Financial Commissioner and the Railway Board in 2019.
It also advised the zones to adopt measures including the reduction in staff cost, rationalizing staff and making them perform multiple tasks.
"Immediate review of re-engaged staff and the feasibility of cutting the same to their minimum shall be explored. Freeze new post creation except for safety-related posts. Review of post created in the last 2 years should be done and if recruitment has not been done against those post the same may be reviewed for surrendering. Rationalization of manpower in workshops" stated the recommendations.
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The letter also advised that a critical review and curtailment of all outsourcing activity should take place and an attempt should be made to shift some of them like on-board health services, station cleaning to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Funds.
It further added that Annual Maintenance Contracts should be reduced to the bare minimum, already sanctioned machinery and plants with unsatisfactory procurement progress should be stopped, there should be strict monitoring of fuel-saving, on account of change in traction, an audit of major load centres and reduced diesel consumption.
The financial commissioner of Railways labelled the annual General Manager inspections a "big affair" in the letter, saying, "annual inspections should be a silent and low key affair with the minimum number of staff required."
In another recommendation, it has been stated that all the file work should be moved to the digital sphere and all correspondence should be done through secure emails.
Along with that, e-office, e-dak, video conferencing etc. should be used extensively to curtail expenditure on manual activities and expenses on stationery articles, cartridges should be cut by at least 50 per cent.
"Expenditure on official vehicles to be reduced to the minimum required. DRMs may conduct a zero-based review of expenditure on vehicles, i.e. MUVs, trucks, official vehicles etc and send a report to GMs," it added.
The grounding of all diesel locomotives of over 31 years through sale or export has also been proposed by the Finance Commissioner.
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