Railways starts rating zones to keep officers on their toes

NEW DELHI: The railway board has started rating its 16 zones, with the aim to ensure that all senior officials take their work seriously as the performance of the zones will be reflected in their promotion and career progression.
In the latest rating done by the railway board between April and December 2016, South Eastern Railway headquartered in Kolkata is on the top while North Eastern Railway with its head office in Gorakhpur has got the last rank.
Interestingly, Northern Railway, with its headquaters in Delhi a few kilometres from the railway board office, was third from last.
As the new railway dispensation under Suresh Prabhu has brought in a private sector-like appraisal system , the career graph of top officers will depend on the amount of money they have helped the state-run transporter earn, physical assets they have helped create and punctuality of trains.
The ranking is based on a set of 17 key performance indicators (KPIs) such as operational and financial performance measured by passenger traffic and freight loading among others.
The KPIs have been made part of the annual performance appraisal reports (APARs) of general managers, divisional railway managers and departmental heads in zonal railways.
“Zonal railways are being evaluated as per relative performance on each indicator by comparing the targets fixed for each one after much deliberation,” said a senior official.
The KPIs have been set against five broad categories of performance linked directly to the health of Indian Railways. These categories are operational and financial performance, capacity enhancement, capacity utilisation, asset reliability, and manpower training and upgrade. Under financial/operational performance, how much freight has been carried by a zone and how many passengers it has handled will carry maximum weightage.
Zonal and divisional units were asked for targets for the year. Now, each general manager, DRM and departmental heads are being evaluated against his/her own targets.
Read this story in Bengali