Court Cases Against Railways on Service Related Matters - Reasons and Remedies

摘要

Despite several provisions are available to ensure Right to Equality and non-discrimination as per the Constitution of India and other legislatures, it cannot be said with guarantee that, no railway employee or family member of deceased employee has ever been subjected to discrimination with regard to service related issues. Though figure of such cases is not enormous but instances are there where members of Indian Railway family had to knock doors of the courts seeking relief against discrimination by their employers. Reputation is definitely not measured by the number how many members in the family went to court against head of the family and the failure to manage the family makes explicit even if a single child or the wife goes to court against the head. Similarly relation failure is equally applicable if, even a single employee is made to go to court against railway administration seeking relief what he ought to receive from his employer in time. Well educated and trained HR managers cannot ignore their moral responsibility especially in the modern HRM practice. Besides relation breakdown and motivation collapse, huge leakage of revenue by way of advocates' fees, pay, allowances and other benefits to a good number of staff deputed to deal with court cases and many other direct and indirect expenses are borne every now and then towards contesting court cases. Apart from crumpling employee-employer relationship, railway administration builds a blacken image before its employees who got their legitimate dues after intervention of the courts of law. A question very reasonably comes up, as to who made them to go to court, is it not the railway administration itself ? The answer, 'YES' cannot be denied when the benefits sought for are released after court's order. Had their grievances been redressed at grass root level, unquestionably they would not filed cases in the courts of law. It is a curse for the Human Resource Management practitioners in any organisation leading to a barrier to create morale of a dedicated work force. This is high time to control over avoidable expenses by contesting cases in various courts of law. In order to combat with increasing operational cost, especially due to outbreak of vicious Covid-19, the extra load of a lot of expenses reigns in comparison to poor earnings affecting the National economy to a great extent owing to non-running of trains in Nationwide lockdown period. It is not only essential but inescapable to analyze the reasons significantly and find result oriented remedies aiming at multi fold benefits viz. (ⅰ) to give check on mal-expenditure spent by means of advocate's fees, stationery, postage etc besides, salary, TA, conveyance, free journey pass to attend courts etc to staff deputed to defend court cases against railways filed by its employees on service benefits related matters, and (ⅱ) to build employees moral confidence and loyalty on administration aiming at creating a dedicated work force to achieve high quantity-cum-quality production or service at a minimum time and barest low cost.