A staggering 25 million job aspirants have applied for nearly 90,000 vacancies in the Indian Railways. Interestingly, the number of applicants for Indian Railways is more than the entire population of Australia, reports Reuters.
Ashwani Lohani, the chairman of the Indian Railway Board confirmed the huge number of applicants who wanted to join India's biggest employer. "We've not been recruiting for the last couple of years and attrition is already there. And so we require people," Lohani told Reuters.
The Indian Railways employs more than 1.3 million people and have vacancies for positions like engine drivers, technicians, track inspection crews and carpenters, the news agency reported.
The railway recruitment control board had advertised for the vacancies in February following which nearly 25 million aspirants applied. The last date to apply is Saturday, March 31.
The candidates will have to take a written test that is available in 15 languages. Apart from the written exam, they have to pass a physical fitness test, as per the advertisement.
"The huge number of applications shows the level of stress. It shows that there is really a paucity of jobs, and the other thing is about the great preference that Indians have got for government jobs. We need to move away from this," Mahesh Vyas, CEO of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy told Reuters.
According to a railways official, there are over 26,000 loco pilot and technicians' positions while there are 62,907 Group D posts that are vacant in the Indian Railways. Over 50 lakh applicants had applied for the post of assistant loco pilots, The New Indian Express reported.
