Indian Railways in pilot project with TCS to conduct recruitment exam online

MUMBAI: The Indian Railways has tied up with Tata Consultancy Services to pilot a system to conduct its recruitment exams online, as the country’s largest employer looks to introduce transparency into its operations.

For TCS, the pilot is a prestigious one. The railways employ about 1.4 million people and government jobs are highly sought after. In the railway recruitment drive during 2014-15, examinations were conducted for 48,822 vacancies in 284 categories, the railways said in June.

“We are running a pilot with TCS to make the recruitment process more streamlined. Applications are already being doing online but now the exams will also be done online to prevent problems,” an executive with the railway recruitment board said.

He declined to be identified because he is not the authorized spokesperson.

Multiple calls to Amitabha Khare, the executive director of the railway recruitment board, went unanswered. TCS declined to comment saying that it was in its silent period before it announces its first-quarter results on July 9.

The pilot, which is due to start this year, will leverage TCS’ Ion-cloud platform. The exam management tool allows secured question paper creation and distribution.
TCS ties up with colleges to use their infrastructure to conduct the examinations. It already runs the recruitment exams for the Life Insurance Corporation of India, the Common Aptitude Test for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering on behalf of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the All India Engineering Entrance Exam.

For the railways, this is the latest in the slew of IT initiatives that are on the cards. About Rs 5000 crores has been budgeted for technology initiatives in this year’s railway budget. The money will be spent over the next five years. The pilot is also in keeping with Railway Minister’s desire to reduce corruption.

“We have implemented utmost transparency. We need to change the whole system...There is corruption at various levels...But we are committed to do everything to weed out corruption,” Suresh Prabhu said in March in the Rajya Sabha.

Since the Modi government came into power, technology has been a key sector of investment.