BR moves to provide its employees with incentives

NEWS DESK

Bangladesh Railway (BR) has taken a move to provide its thousands of employees with incentives in recognition of their service during the period of coronavirus pandemic.

BR has suspended all its passenger services since the government announced the countrywide shutdown on March 26.

But its cargo service is in operation on a limited scale, keeping the majority of railway stations open for transportation of fuels and goods to and from Chittagong port, land ports and Kamalapur Inland Container Depot.

Since then, BR operated more than 300 container trains.

However, the BR authority has drawn criticism for not providing personal protective equipment for station staff including stationmasters, class III and IV employees to carry out their duties.

They include railway police, yard master, loco master, traffic inspector, station manager and masters of mainline, guards, points men, head booking clerk, and shunting porter.

Officials said taking the situation into consideration, the Ministry of Railway has given instructions to make a list of the said staff.

"We have many engineers and employees working for transportation, commercial and security sections. So, we need to prepare the list from the heads of the sections to collect information from field levels," said an official.

Soon after getting the list, he said, it will be sent to the MoR for necessary actions.

Sources said the MoR has also instructed the BR to collect the names of the staff who have been infected with coronavirus or showing its symptoms while discharging their duties during the government-announced general holidays.

The BR is operating through eastern and western zones with more than 25,000 officials and workers. During the lockdown, several thousand railway engineers and workers at field level have to walk long way to reach stations due to lack of vehicles.

As the BR has yet to convert into computerized inter-locking system, it is still operating its services manually.