NFIR bats for 145;son of the soil146; theory

Raghavaiah, who is also a staff side leader in the Joint Consultative Machinery JCM National Council, said this will avert repeats of Mumbai-like attacks on the candidates. He was in the city ahead of the 28th biennial conference of Western Railway Mazdoor Sangh WRMS, which began at Rajkot on Wednesday.

He said there is no need to fill the Group D posts on an all-India basis, because it does not require any high-end technical qualifications warranting national level competitive exams.

8220;Instead, they should authorise zonal general managers and divisional managers to recruit local candidates. The exam should be held simultaneously across the country, so that there is no scope for the candidates taking multiple exams,8221; he said.

This, Raghavaiah said, is possible without violating the right to equal opportunity as enshrined in the Constitution of India.

He said so far, the government would hide behind the Constitutional stipulation to justify all India tests at different places and on different dates.

He was lavish in his praise for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for prevailing over Finance Minister P Chidambaram on quantum of bonus to the railway employees and in improving provisions of the Sixth Pay Commission.

However, he said there are certain anomalies left in the Commission report and that those anomalies meant gross neglect and injustice to certain categories of railway employees.

These categories included assistant loco pilots 42,000, station masters 72,000, train controllers 3,200, senior section engineers 96,000 and technicians 1,60,000. 8220;From recruitment till retirement, employees in these categories undergo the toil of remaining on foot plate but still not paid in accordance with their performance and productivity,8221; he said.

WRMS general secretary and NFIR office-bearer J G Mahurkar said that such treatment has left them restive and because of that, the NFIR will take up their cause in its forthcoming meets at Rajkot and later at Bhopal, where future course of action would be worked out. He said that over 9,000 employees in these categories have succumbed to mishaps. Not only that, he said, it was unfortunate that even though 80 per cent of technicians were engineering diploma holders, they were kept in Group D.