Source – theprint.in
New Delhi: With the Modi government having decided to merge all eight existing rail services into a single Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS), the UPSC will now be holding an exclusive railway service exam, ThePrint has learnt.
The exclusive UPSC exam for the new Indian Railway Management Service (IRMS) will be first conducted in 2021.
This year’s UPSC exam will follow the earlier pattern — in which officers for the Indian Railway Accounts Service, Indian Railway Traffic Service, Indian Railway and the Indian Railway Personnel Service will be recruited through the Civil Services Exam (CSE), while those for the other services will be recruited through the Indian Engineering Service (IES) exam.
From next year onwards, however, there will be a common preliminary exam for the railway service but the main exam for engineers will be on their specialised domain expertise and not general studies, an official said on condition of anonymity.
“It would follow the Indian Forest Service (IFS) exam pattern,” the official said. “IFS officers have the same preliminary exam as IAS, IPS among others but have a specialised mains paper exclusively designed for them.”
UPSC will be intimated about the number of officers needed in the IRMS from 2021 onwards.
Senior UPSC officials, however, said the commission has received no such proposal.
“The government will decide how to go about it…We have not been informed or asked about anything yet,” an official said.
The commission also has no knowledge of whether the new IRMS will be considered a civil service or not.
DoPT not consulted before Railways service merger
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), which is the coordinating agency for all personnel matters, was not consulted by the Modi government before the controversial merger, ThePrint has learnt.
The DoPT looks after recruitment, regulation of service conditions, postings and transfers, deputation and training of civil servants, and comes directly under the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
“They announced that they would consult the DoPT and UPSC after making the announcement,” said a DoPT official. “But despite the fact that the DoPT is the nodal agency for these matters, it was not consulted before the announcement was made.”
Officials are foreseeing a lot of problems in unifying the existing cadres of the eight services as well. “There will be issues of promotion, seniority, among others. All those need to be reconciled,” the official added.