The long-standing manpower shortage that Bangladesh Railway (BR) is suffering from is unlikely to be resolved soon due to procedural complexities and a lack of visionary steps.
The recruitments of around 40,000 employees were approved more than three years ago. Yet, 70 per cent of the posts at the state-owned train operator remain vacant.
It now functions with nearly 24,000 employees, who plan, implement, operate, and maintain over 4,500 kilometres of tracks and 500 stations.
The Enam Committee prepared an organogram for BR in 1982 and recommended 82,892 employees for smooth operations.
The organisation let around 10,000 experienced employees go with a golden handshake in the early 1990s. The recruitment drives made afterwards were spoiled by corruption and irregularities, which prevailed till the last Awami League government's term.
The involvement of many ministers and officials in recruitment resulted in various irregularities, massively disrupting the flow of the process. Cases have also been filed over hiring anomalies, and most of those are yet to be resolved.
Third- and fourth-grade employees account for around 90 per cent of BR's recruitments.
Sources said due to procedural complexities, including the 2024 quota protests that toppled the Awami League government, the 40,000 recruitments approved in September 2021 could not be carried out yet.
The recruitments of 47,637 employees were approved at the time. Of them, 5,842 were hired in various posts as per the 40 per cent quota system and they joined work, said officials.
But complexities arose over the recruitments of around 2,900 employees. Their applications were received and written tests were held before the July-August student-led movement, but the authorities could not decide which quota system they would follow to finalise the recruitments.
During the quota protests, a circular was issued on July 23 to follow a seven per cent quota system in government jobs.
Of the 2,900 recruitments, written exams for 600 posts have been completed while 2,324 applications are being processed. These recruitments came from job circulars published in different times before the July-August movement.
An official said though the public administration ministry resolved the quota dispute for these recruitments last month, BR has not carried out the recruitments as the finance ministry has not approved the budget yet.
The public administration ministry directed BR on January 23 to follow the 7 per cent quota system in all upcoming recruitments and complete all the previous recruitments, which are under process, based on the 40 per cent quota.
BR's demand for manpower in all its development projects, including Padma Bridge, Cox's Bazar-Dohazari, and Khulna-Mongla rail links, was never met. This made it unable to operate the new stations or lines at full capacity after the projects were completed.
Due to recruitment delays, more than 30 stations developed under these three mega projects could not be opened, though nearly half a trillion taka was spent on building more than 200 new tracks.
The loss-making BR cannot run new trains properly on the new routes. Trains cannot make halts at new stations because the latter could not be opened due to lack of manpower. Only four trains can operate on the Padma Bridge tracks developed at a cost of Tk 392.46 billion.
Since 2009, BR has completed 90 projects by spending Tk 235.72 billion.
Insiders alleged that due to lack of knowledge about railway in the whole government machinery, visionary measures were always absent in BR's development activities, including manpower recruitment.
One of them alleged railway officials were unaware of many of the posts required to run BR smoothly as they did not study the Enam Committee's 1982 organogram.
smunima@yahoo.com
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