Vadodara’s Railway Staff College to be converted to railway university

The National Academy of Indian Railways (NAIR) or Bharatiya Rail Rashtriya Akademy, formerly Railway Staff College, at Vadodara, is being converted into a full-fledged Railway University.

The National Academy of Indian Railways is the training and management development institute for gazetted officers of Indian Railways.

NAIR, like its predecessor the Railway Staff College, functions out of the Pratap Vilas Palace at Vadodara, where the proposed railway university will also initially function from.

The institute trains newly-appointed officers, senior managers and executives. The college also trains officers of other Group A services of the government of India, minister of state for railways Manoj Sinha has said.

Sinha, who arrived on a two-day visit to Gujarat, said on Saturday that the state government was helping Indian Railways identify land to set up a full-fledged railway university.

"The present campus for National Academy of Indian Railways, Vadodara, will be initially used to start the railway university. After land acquisition, a full-fledged university will be started here," he said. He added that the proposal to set up the railway university had been declared by the railway ministry in December 2015.

The ministry of human resource development has worked out detailed modalities for this and it will be soon placed in Parliament for approval, he said.

"In the first phase, the university will start offering MBA and MTech degrees, after which it will offer diploma and BTech in railway operations," he said.

Indian Railways employs over 1.25 million personnel (including 15,000 group 'A' and group 'B' officers). The training of non-gazetted staff is organised at 55 main training centres and 222 other training centers (ie, Area Training Centres, Basic Training Centres, Divisional Training Centres, Multi Disciplinary Training Centres, etc).

Training of officers is conducted at seven centralised training institutes (CTIs), including the National Academy of Indian Railways, which is headed by a director general (of the rank of general manager in Indian Railways and special secretary in the government of India).

At present, GC Agarwal is the director general. There are 24 faculty members specialising in specific areas like accounts and audit, personnel and HR, medical, management, civil  and mechanical engineering, telecommunications, etc).

Administratively, all the CTIs come under the training directorate of the ministry of railways (Railway Board), government of India which also actively monitors the training programs conducted by them.

Sinha, however, said Mumbai will continue to be the headquarters of the Western Railway.

"Mumbai will continue to be the WR headquarters and the proposal to shift it to Ahmedabad or Gandhinagar (in Gujarat) has been rejected in the past. There arises no question to deliberate on the issue again," he said.

Sinha said the location of railway headquarters is decided on the basis of operational and administrative requirements, consistent with the needs of economy and efficiency and not on regional considerations.