Part 2
Report by Kamgar Ekta Committee (KEC) correspondent
The online meeting of All India Forum Against Privatisation (AIFAP) on Sunday, July 20, 2025 on the topic, “Oppose the contractualisation of work in safety category of Indian Railways and immediately recruit required additional manpower in each department!” was addressed by Shri Akhilesh Pandey, President, Indian Railway Employees Federation (IREF), Shri Aloke Chandra Prakash, General Secretary, Indian Railway Signal and Telecommunication Maintainers Union (IRSTMU), Shri Ashok Kumar, Joint Secretary, Kamgar Ekta, Committee (KEC), Shri L. Bhoopathi, President, All India Train Controllers Association (AITCA), Shri D. Biswas, General Secretary, All India Guards Council (AIGC), Shri S.C. Purohit, Secretary General, All India Station Masters Association (AISMA), Shri Amzad Baig, President, All India Pointsmen Association (AIPMA) and Shri Chand Mohammad, national leader of Track Maintainers.
Here below are the key points made by speakers.
The condition of Signal & Telecom (S&T) workers
The S&T Division is of utmost importance as far as the safety and security of train operations is concerned. The interlocking circuits that these workers build are very important and complex. All of them receive about a year and a half of training before they can begin working. With contracts of two years, for how long would these workers be able to contribute?
Interlocking is not at all easy to understand. Each Relay Room has lakhs of wires and electrical connections. Even little mistakes lead to grievous results. Small accidents are being ignored. When there was a fire at Bhopal station in the relay room, all the trains were affected. The horrific Balasore incident was an interlock problem. Just 2 wires that were wrongly connected led to such grievous loss of lives!
The government fails to implements its own yardsticks. As per this yardstick, there ought to be night failure gangs at all stations. Not even one station has them today, which means that the vacancies are 100%!
Likewise it was decreed that every gang operating track machines should have one workers from the S&T department in it. This order is also 100% not implemented, which means that there are 100% vacancies there!
After the Track Maintainers, S&T workers get run over the most – about 6 per month are crushed by trains.
The 2010 yardstick was not implemented, and neither was the 2017 one, leading to 1.5 lakh vacancies. Instead of filling these, in 2022 they made a new yardstick based on routes, which meant that on paper, vacancies were shown to be reduced!
Atrocious condition of other Indian Railway (IR) workers
A huge number of vacancies, inordinately long working hours, safety given the go-by, not enough rest, are common problems faced by IR workers across the board. As a result, workers suffer from a lot of physical problems like diabetes, Blood Pressure, heart attacks, etc. They are not able to give time to family, friends or to the society at large, which has adverse effects on their mental and emotional health. This affects the safety of passengers as well.
In the North Eastern Railway Zone, for instance, at one time there was only a single line and 45,000 workers were employed. Now there are only 41,000 when there are multiple lines.
In 2005, the then Prime Minister had promised that there would be a 5 day roster for the week, which means that there would be 2 days each week for rest. This has not been implemented.
Rakshak devices should be given to all who have to work on tracks. This includes S& T, Track Maintainers and TRD staff. They are not given and this has resulted in 2-3 track maintainers being run over every day!
While there are 38,900 sanctioned posts of Station Masters (SM), there are only about 36,000 today.
There are 7000 stations. Some come under EI (EssentiallyIntermittent) roster, which means there are shifts of 12 hours each. In each of these shifts 24 trains pass. Overall there are 1590 stations under EI roster. In the Nagpur Division of SECR, 63 out of 95 stations are under EI!
SMs face violence because there are stations in secluded spots like jungles, where they are alone at the station!
SMs have no basic facilities at their workplaces, like separate, attached toilets, safe drinking water, good furniture and ACs. Only 600-700 station masters’ cabins are well furnished. Women Station Masters face additional problems, especially when they are pregnant.
The Train Controller staff was increased by only 8% whereas the number of trains has multiplied. Today in Nagpur Division, for 946 km there is only 1 Controller. The rules are obsolete and the vacancies are calculated wrongly.
While there should be 70,000 Pointsmen, there are only 65,000. Some of the Pointsmen are asked to do SM’s duties.
In every season Track Maintainers have to do hard physical labour outdoors, whether biting cold, pouring rain or blazing sun. They have to walk for miles and miles, carrying heavy loads. They have to sit by the tracks and eat. They are provided no drinking water or decent places where they could rest. There are no toilets for women.
Equally shocking conditions of workers in other sectors.
In many other category of workers which are directly linked with the safety of working people and their users, similar shocking situation exists. Just like IR workers in safety category, the vacancies in all those other sectors have increased the work load to unbearable levels thus compromising their own and consumers safety.
In power sector, even in most of the government owned distribution companies a very large amount of work is outsourced to private contractors even in safety categories like linesmen, sub-stations etc. who have to work at high voltage.
In health sector even in ICUs agencies are being appointed to provide doctors and nursing staff on contract. The private contractors to increase their profits many times put freshers and inadequately trained personnel even in ICUs! In most of the public sector hospitals including IR hospitals and PHCs the vacancies of doctors and nursing staff range from 25 to 60 %!
Similarly, Pollution control Boards and Factory Inspector offices which are supposed to oversee safety of workers working in establishments and also safety of those residing in areas around various industries have huge vacancies due to which they cannot complete the stipulated audits.
Contractualization now not an exception but a rule!
Due to struggles waged by workers all over the world and in India, governments were forced to pass laws like Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970. On paper, these Acts prohibit employing workers on temporary or contract basis for doing work which is of permanent nature.
The Act has neither regulated not abolished contract work. On the contrary there has been a large-scale shift from regular permanent jobs to temporary and contractual jobs.
Capitalist owned companies, whose only motive is to maximize profits, kept on finding ways and means to overtly or covertly beat this law.
While the total workers in organised manufacturing sector increased from 1.22 crore to 1.36 crore between 2018 and 2022, the share of contract workers jumped from 36.2 per cent to 40.2 per cent. Thus, two out of five are now contract workers in organised manufacturing sector. Out of 14 lakh workers added during the five years as many as 10.5 lakh (75%) were contractual jobs.
Especially since launch of LPG, capitalist idealogues have been promoting the idea that even every PSE should be run with a profit motive.
That is why we see that contractualization is not restricted to private sector. In case of central public sector enterprises, not only the total number of workers reduced, the share of contract and casual workers more than doubled during the last nine years. The total number of workers fell from 17.3 lakh employees to 14.6 lakh employees in 2022. The share of contract plus casual workers during this period shot up from 19.1 per cent to 42.4 per cent.
Thus the governments themselves are the biggest violators of the laws! Such a large-scale use of contract workers by the government’s own units has not only made the Contract Workers Act redundant but encouraged private capitalists to totally ignore the Act.
In all the PSEs and government departments too, Contractualization has become a rule rather than an exception. That is why unions of working people in sectors like Banks, Insurance, Mining, Power, Shipping, Education, Public health, Municipalities and Zilla parishads etc. are demanding banning contractualization.
Lessons from our experience
From our experience we all know that contract workers are used as a tool to foil strike struggle of even the permanent workers. Struggles of permanent workers in Power sector, Education, Public health, Banking are some of the recent examples.
Various provisions of the four labor codes make it easier for further and easier expansion of contract system by exempting contractors with less than 50 workers from various Labour laws.
Very clearly the source of the problem of increasing contractualization is the capitalist orientation of economy according to which every enterprise, whether private or government, must be run with only one motive i.e. minimizing expenses and maximizing profits.
A very important lesson for us is that irrespective of which political party forms the government at the center or state level, contractualization has continuously increased.
This is so because most of the big political parties who have formed governments follow the dictate of their financers, the capitalist class! Even now some political parties which are making a show of opposing the Four labour codes framed by the BJP led government, in the states where they themselves are in power, have done nothing to reduce the contractualization. (examples AAP in Delhi when in power and in Punjab, Congress led government in Karnataka, etc.).
The economy can either be oriented towards maximizing public welfare or towards maximizing private profit. The two goals are not compatible.
It is necessary to understand that the class of capitalists led by the big monopolies is ruling India. These capitalists set the agenda, they fund the different parties who implement the agenda once they are elected. We workers and other people have no power in this so-called democracy. Regardless of who we vote for or don’t vote at all, at the most the parties forming the government change. The agenda, the policies do not.
The way forward
In the short term we must organize and explain to working people how increasing contractualization jeopardizes not only the safety of the contract workers but of the consumers too. An informed public is our strength.
We should demand an immediate end to contractualization, outsourcing and privatization of PSEs and government departments and private enterprises.
We should demand that any enterprise meant to serve the people , like Transport, Education, Electricity, Health, Telephony, Internet, Pharmaceuticals, Public distribution and Food etc. should never have profit as its motive. They have been built with and run with money that people have paid by way of taxes. Public money should be used for public welfare, not for enriching capitalists!
But this is not enough. We must unite and teach the working class to organize as a class and lead the fight to replace the rule of the capitalists by that of workers and peasants!