Two weeks after the devastating train accident which left 288 passengers dead and over 900 injured in Odisha, the Ministry of Railways transferred Atulya Sinha out of his post as the Additional General Manager of South Eastern Railway, on Thursday.
According to Railways sources, the officer was instead posted as the Principal Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, a factory located in Paschim Bardhaman district, West Bengal. This is considered a downgrade, though the post is in the same Higher Administrative Grade. Though no reason was cited for the shift, the Railway Board’s order said that Mr. Sinha’s transfer was being done with the approval of the President.
Eastern Railway’s Principal Chief Engineer A.K. Dubey was posted as the new AGM of South Eastern Railway.
Transfer post collision
This is the first major transfer after the multi-train collision — involving the Coromandel Express, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express, and a stationary goods train — at Bahanaga Bazar railway station in the Balasore Division of South Eastern Railway on June 2. Mr. Sinha had been one of the top officers who visited the scene of the collision in an accident relief train to supervise the rescue operations, the sources said.
The accident, the worst in several years, occurred on a day when the top-level management of the Indian Railways, including the General Managers of all Zonal Railways, were in New Delhi to participate in the Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) convened to prepare an action plan to implement Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Vision 2047’.
Filling vacancies
In a related development, sources said that the Railway Board had directed the General Managers of all Zonal Railways to take immediate steps to fill vacancies — via promotions — in the safety category. Of the 70,000 appointment letters distributed by Mr. Modi to recruits for various government departments at the National Rozgar Mela on Tuesday, 22,752 were for various posts in the safety category of the Railways.
