No separate exam for Indian Railway Management Service, says Railways Ministry

“Ministry of Railways in consultation with UPSC and DoPT has decided that recruitment to Indian Railway Management Service (IRMS) will be done through the Civil Services Examination to be conducted by the UPSC for the year 2023,” said a statement from the ministry Thursday.

Sources said Railways is not ready enough to go for the separate exam for which it has to support the UPSC to create one—syllabus and related mater. As a result, this year recruitment into the Indian Railway Management Service will happen through the Civil Services Examination.

As per the original notification published in December last year, the first batch of 150 new IRMS inductees was to be taken from the Indian Railway Management Service Examination of UPSC in 2023.

IRMSE was to be a two-tier examination—a Preliminary Screening Examination, followed by a Main Written Examination, and an Interview. For screening a suitable number of candidates for the second stage of the examination, like IRMS (Main) Written Examination, all eligible candidates were required to appear in the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination and a suitable number of candidates were to be screened for IRMS (Main) Examination, a Railways ministry statement had said.

Officials on Thursday did not say that the plan for an IRMSE has been completely thrown out the window for good. “It will take some more time to institutionalise the exam later. For this year we will recruit through the civil services examination,” said a source.

The IRMSE rules notified earlier had said that in order to help Railways separate candidates into desired specialisation, the candidate had to choose one optional subject from the list of four which were: Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Commerce and Accountancy.

Officials said that getting some kind of specialisation, especially engineers through the Civil Services Examination, would be a challenge but not impossible. In 2019, over 50 per cent of the probationers taken from the Civil Services Examination came from an engineering background, an official said.

“For now, instead of not recruiting anyone because the exam is not ready, it was felt that recruiting a certain number from the Civil Services Examination would help in tiding over the manpower requirement,” said an official.