Cabinet approves continuation of Passes to Railway Employees & Pensioners

Cabinet approves continuation of Passes to
Railway Employees & Pensioners

The General Secretary of IRTSA has written in his website regarding this pass issue. We reproduce the total content of the post in our blog for your information...



It is heartening that the Union Cabinet has approved the continuation of
Passes to Railway Employees & Pensioners on July 15, 2010 at the instance of the
Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee – finally over ruling the recommendations of
the Expenditure Reforms Commission - made in 2004 for discontinuation of the
Passes to Railway Employees & Pensioners.



According to reports appearing in a section of Press (including ‘The
Tribune’, Chandigarh), an in-house Committee set up by the Railway Ministry had
assessed the annual expenditure - as Rs.528 crores - on Passes to 14 lakh Railway Employees & Rs.57 crores on Passes to 12 lakh Pensioners (as in 2004) –
with an estimated cost of Rs.3311 per pass for serving employees and Rs.498 per
pass of Pensioners.



However, according to an estimate of IRTSA team, the actual impact on the
Railways is much less due to only partial utilization of the Passes by the Railway
Employees & Pensioners - considering that only a fraction of the journey is actually performed by them than for which the Passes are actually issued. Many of
the Railway Employees & Pensioners don’t even take a single set of pass or not at
least full complement thereof as per their entitlement in a year – due to localized settlement and lack of resources to meet with the over head expenses of a journey.



But the Financial people while calculating financial impact of such
privileges don’t look at all these factors. Apparently the estimated figure of expenditure of Rs.471 crores p.a. on Passes for Railway employees and Rs.57 crores p.a. on Passes to the Pensioners - as worked out by the said Committee - was much on the higher side considering the above said factors.