ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Friday highlighted the need for overhauling the Pakistan Railways (PR) while regretting that the organisation could not properly function with huge surplus employees who were incompetent and insincere to their institution.

“Complete overhauling of the Railways is required,” observed Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed while heading a two-judge Supreme Court bench that had taken up a case regarding regularisation of around 76,000 employees of the PR.

The chief justice also referred to the repeated occurrence of train accidents in which not only a number of innocent lives had been lost but the PR also had to suffer huge financial losses.

It had become the order of the day that every week an incident occurred, the chief justice observed, recalling how six months ago a major accident took place in which a number of passengers died but no report on it had come to light so far. Similarly another accident a week ago had caused heavy financial losses to the Railways, the chief justice observed.

Secretary asked to submit report on operations in a month

The PR was continuously running into losses but the incompetent employees would never let the department to go into profit, the chief justice said, adding that everybody knew about the state of affairs in the railways since it was not a secret to anybody.

Declaring his explanation unsatisfactory, the apex court directed the railways secretary to submit a report on the operations and employees of the PR within a month.

The chief justice told the railways secretary that he was unable to run the PR, adding that a train or aircraft accident was not a joke. “The railway system has become corrupt entirely,” the chief justice regretted.

The court also highlighted the need for initiating an overhauling of the PR through a reform process to weed out incompetent and surplus employees.

In its order, the chief justice said that the railways could not properly work with 76,000 employees who were not only incompetent but also insincere to their department.

Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2020