Railway employees? privilege of availing free rides may come to an end soon. The Cabinet is likely to decide on Thursday whether to continue with the current practice of allowing free rail travel to the employees, existing or retired, of the Indian Railways or not.
The decision will impact 14 lakh existing and 11 lakh retired employees of the national transporter. The proposal has been given by Expenditure Reform Commission to increase the revenues of the entity.
The Railways annually provides six privilege passes to each of its officers and four passes to its workers, enabling them to ride on trains for free. The entity has 13,000 existing officers and the remaining are workers. However, an employee who uses the free ride facility cannot claim leave travel allowance.
If the Cabinet decides to stop the practice of giving free privilege passes, the Railways will earn revenue on every journey undertaken by the existing employees and pensioners. However, it will have to pay leave travel allowance entitlement as a substitute.
A senior railway official told FE that the impact would not be much. ?Not many people use the facility and hence the actual revenue forgone is not a substantial sum,? the official said, deciding to conceal the figure of revenue that is not earned. The Indian Railways is trying to reduce expenditure and increase revenue to improve the availability of funds that could be used to finance Rs 14 lakh crore projects it planned for the next 10 years.