Reports suggest that the railways’ track record in recruiting and training its human resources is not of the highest standard. They have also failed to maintain the basic safety standards.
In order to show her predecessor Laloo Prasad as “not so successful” railway minister, Mamata Banerjee came out with a white paper in 2009. It the overburdening of the tracks, “Skewed traffic patterns on the Railways, with more than 55% of the traffic moving on the golden quadrilateral and its diagonals, has saturated the HDN with over two-thirds of the sections showing a utilisation of over 100 per cent.”
The Comptroller and Accountant General in its report in 2010 also recommended measures to improve safety. Its recommendations included maintaining proper data of defects on tracks and rolling stock. On the recruitment front, railways under Mamata’s leadership could not do much. The safety related vacancies in 2010 were estimated to be around 1, 38,000. Till now only 16,000 posts in category ‘D’ could be filled up. About 85,000 posts in category ‘C’ were advertised in December 2010 but no recruitments could be made so far.
During Mamata’s tenure railways witnessed massive train accidents. Indian Railways is being run by three Ministers of State. It has witnessed 27 accidents from April onwards that claimed 125 lives.