In this regard, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed to launch the smart card project between Ministry of Railways and NADRA aimed at determining the accurate strength of its employees, sources in the Ministry of Railways told APP.
They said that despite signing of the MoU with NADRA, the project still lies in limbo and even data of employees has not been collected so far. The sources said that MoU was signed between Pakistan Railways and NADRA in August 2017, according to which the previous government had to provide NADRA with the details of its employees for the issuance of smart cards. They said former Minister for Railways had claimed that the ages-old system of Pakistan Railways, human resources would be revamped through these cards but like several other projects of the department, this one is also facing delays and the present government has also shown no interest in it so far.
The sources said the purpose of the smart cards was to enable PR to access the data of their employees in one click whereas the cards would have all the important information of each employee including his or her date of appointment, retirement, personal information, designation, pay scale and family chart.
“If the cards are issued, Pakistan railways will have the accurate strength of its employees and it will also help in removing flaws or ghost employees that are usually hired under the heads of contingent or daily wager staff,” they said.
They said that Pakistan Railways could not work on the provision of the card as the flaws would be revealed and the matter of ghost employees would also become a point of concern.
NADRA had quoted high rates per card as there are more than 70,000 employees and it was getting costly.
Another reason for the delay is that Pakistan Railways employees are all over Pakistan and their data is dispersed.
We are still in a process of gathering the data, and this is a time-taking task,” they added.
They said the card had to have complete data of each Pakistan Railways employee which included medical details, place of posting, joining, grade, scale, designation and family details.