BR is finally set to hire new staff

After a three-year hiatus, Bangladesh Railway (BR) is finally set to begin the process to hire 12,000-15,000 more employees over the next five years. This is indeed good news as BR has desperately been lacking manpower which, among other reasons, affected its delivery of vital services and even hampered regular train operations.

A total of 15,350 out of 40,275 existing posts remained vacant till June this year, which meant that the operation of more than 100 stations could not be resumed due to a lack of manpower. This begs the question: why did BR wait this long to decide to resume filling the vacancies—and it is important to mention that filling those vacancies will still take even more time—when it doesn't even have enough manpower to properly run day-to-day train operations? How is that fair to the people? And to what extent did it compromise train safety?

According to a report published by this newspaper around the time of the horrendous train accident in Brahmanbaria last November, the lack of manpower is one of the reasons why we have seen a spike in railway-related accidents in recent years. Which means that the apathy shown by the authorities over the last years in hiring new employees has even resulted in the loss of lives. That is a form of criminal negligence and is absolutely unacceptable. The fact that lives have been lost—and can still be if past patterns hold—means that the lack of urgency shown by the authorities simply cannot be brushed under the rug and forgotten anymore. Someone is responsible for this, and they must be held to account.

On the other hand, the authorities must also recruit the manpower that BR lacks to properly and safely run trains. Now that it has been decided that BR will recruit more staff, we hope that the actual recruitment does not drag on like its decision to do so did previously. We also hope that the recruitment process will be fair, transparent and competitive, and no corrupt practices will take place to either disrupt or undermine the process.