The Centre on Wednesday ruled out special recruitment drives for filling vacancies of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in Railways. Replying to supplementaries in the Lok Sabha, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the Railways has been recruiting personnel at regular intervals and there was no need to launch special drives.

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He said the last special recruitment drive by the Railways was held in 2008 to clear the backlog of vacancies of SCs, STs and OBCs.

In pursuance of Special Recruitment Drive launched in 2008 as per the directives of Department of Personnel & Training (DOP&T), as many as 14,868 backlog vacancies — SCs (4003), STs (4143) & OBCs (6722) — were identified for clearance in a time-bound manner and the same had been fully cleared as on March 3, 2017, Vaishnaw said.

He said since 2010, the recruitment process in Railways was being done regularly through authorized recruiting agencies — Railway Recruitment Boards (RRBs) and Railway Recruitment Cells (RRCs). The shortfall or backlog vacancies of SCs, STs and OBCs left unfilled are taken care of in the subsequent recruitment cycle, Vaishnaw said.

He said the Railways is conducting online recruitment and the process is being expedited. A total of 1,40,713 vacancies, including 20,944 SC and 10,930 ST, are presently under recruitment for level-1 to level-7, the minister said.

(Edited by : Shloka Badkar)