New Delhi: Indian Railways is running special trains for applicants appearing in the railway examination for 60,000 posts of assistant loco pilot and technician to be held from 9 August.
The railways in a statement on Tuesday said special trains will be run between Patna and Indore, Danapur and Secunderabad, Muzaffarpur and Secunderabad, and Darbhanga and Secunderabad. The trains will comprise general class and second class coaches.
The move comes after the railways had drawn flak from several quarters, including job aspirants, who complained that they were allotted examination centres beyond 200 km. Most of the complaints were from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The railways justified the allocation of centres stating that in few states, the proportion of applicants is much more than the available exam centres so inter-state movement of some candidates is inevitable. The railway exam for the post of assistant loco-pilot and technician will be a centralized computer-based exam.
More than 47 lakh candidates have applied for the position of assistant loco pilot and technician. Of these, 9.5 lakh are from Uttar Pradesh, while 9 lakh and 4.5 lakh are from Bihar and Rajasthan, respectively. Seeing the huge response, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal last week also decided to increase the number of vacancies from 26,502 to 60,000.
While the railways are gearing up for such a mass recruitment, on an average 40,000 to 45,000 employees retire every year from Indian Railways, according to the All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF), a union of railway employees. The Indian Railways spends a big chunk of its finances on its staff, with expenses on this score growing from ₹69,713.22 crore in 2016-17 to ₹72,705.57 crore in 2017-18. For the next fiscal, staff expenditure is pegged at ₹76,451.89 crore.