Will railway GMs soon enjoy perks & pay of union secys?

New Delhi: Union Minister Piyush Goyal has proposed a higher rank and pay scale for Railway general managers, making them equivalent to secretaries in the Central government, and at par with the state chief secretaries, a source in the ministry said.

This is a second time in three years that a railway minister has made such a proposal for zonal GMs, the last being a letter from the then minister Suresh Prabhu who had suggested the same in a letter to the pay commission in 2015.

As part of a significant restructuring in railways, Goyal has readied a proposal in which he has suggested a string of administrative changes one of which is the introduction of a post in the Railway Board to exclusively focus on safety issues of the national transporter, along with the upgradation of the position of the zonal GMs, sources said. Goyal has proposed that GMs, who are responsible for each one of the 16 zones of the Indian Railways, should now have the rank of state chief secretaries and director general of police. Currently, they are ex-officio special secretary rank officers.