The railways have done away with the provision of minimum educational qualification for jobs on compassionate grounds to wives or widows of its employees, who retired for medical reasons or died in service.

Under the present norms, the minimum educational qualification required to be eligible for such employment is Class 10 for Level-1 or Group ‘D’ jobs.

In a recent communication, the Board said there were a lot of queries from zonal railways about cases in which the wife or the widow of the employee didn’t have the minimum required qualification for Level-1 job on compassionate grounds.

After deliberating on the queries for some time, the Board decided the rule for mandatory minimum educational qualification be scrapped.

“The matter was under consideration of this ministry for quite some time. It has now been decided that in case of appointment of a wife not having requisite minimum educational qualification, she will be placed in Level-1 of the pay matrix… without insisting on fulfilment of educational qualification norms,” says the Railway Board letter dated April 6.

The board has said that these appointments can be made provided the appointing authority is satisfied that the duties of the post against which the appointment is being made can be performed with help of some on-job training.