Pramila Singh Named CPO, Central Railway

Pramila Singh, presently Chief Personnel Officer of Western Railway, has been transferred to Central Railway and posted as Chief Personnel Officer there, according to an order issued by the Railway Board. She is an officer of the Indian Railway Personnel Service.

The Chief Personnel Officer is the senior-most human resources functionary on an Indian Railways zone, responsible for recruitment, staff welfare, industrial relations with railway unions, promotions and disciplinary matters covering a workforce that runs into tens of thousands of employees on a zone the size of Central Railway. Headquartered in Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus building, Central Railway operates across Maharashtra and parts of Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, running both suburban services in Mumbai and long-distance freight and passenger operations, making its CPO's portfolio one of the more demanding personnel charges on the network given the scale and diversity of the workforce involved. The zone's staff strength spans everything from loco pilots and station masters to the large maintenance and safety cadres that keep one of the world's busiest suburban rail corridors running, giving the CPO a workforce management task that differs sharply in scale from smaller zones elsewhere on the network.

Singh's move follows her tenure as Chief Personnel Officer of Western Railway, a zone that similarly runs Mumbai's suburban network alongside long-distance services toward Gujarat and Rajasthan. As an Indian Railway Personnel Service officer, her career has been built around railway human resources administration rather than the operating or engineering streams that produce most General Managers, a specialisation that becomes especially valuable at the CPO level, where an officer must manage everything from recruitment examinations to negotiations with recognised railway unions over service conditions. IRPS officers typically rise through a mix of divisional and zonal personnel postings before reaching a zone-level CPO charge, a progression that gives them exposure to the full range of staff categories, from gazetted officers to the safety and running staff whose service conditions are governed by railway-specific rules distinct from general central government service.

Her previous posting at Western Railway placed her in charge of personnel matters for one of the network's busier zones, overseeing staff deployment across suburban, freight and long-distance operations, and coordinating welfare schemes for railway employees and their families, including housing allotment, medical benefits and educational support that Indian Railways runs as one of the country's largest employers outside the armed forces.

The transfer between two of the network's most prominent zones, both anchored in Mumbai, reflects the Railway Board's practice of moving senior IRPS officers across zones with comparable scale and complexity rather than confining them to a single zone through much of their career, a rotation intended to expose officers to different labour relations environments and workforce compositions before they reach Railway Board-level assignments.

Central Railway's personnel charge carries particular weight given the zone's history of labour relations complexity, including periodic disputes over promotion policies, recruitment quotas and safety-category staffing that have drawn scrutiny from railway unions and parliamentary committees overseeing the railways. The CPO also plays a central role in implementing Railway Board directives on staff welfare schemes, pension processing under the New Pension Scheme transition, and recruitment drives conducted through the Railway Recruitment Boards that report administratively to the zone's personnel department.

The transfer takes effect with immediate effect, as per the order issued by the Railway Board, with Singh expected to take charge of her new assignment at Central Railway headquarters in Mumbai shortly after the order's issuance, while Western Railway awaits notification of her successor as Chief Personnel Officer.