East Coast Railway to receive Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant Shield for overall performance

The East Coast Railway is set to receive the prestigious Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant Best Zonal Railway Shield-2020 for All Round Performance among all the zones in Indian Railways. Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal will handover this shield to East Coast Railway during Railway National Award Function. On the occasion, East Coast Railway will also be receiving shields for traffic transportation, accounts and financial management, and sales management.

ECoR will be receiving this shield for the third time. Earlier, it had bagged the shield for All Round Performance in 2008-09 and 2015-16. The shield was instituted in the memory of Late Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, a renowned freedom fighter and former Union Minister. Every year, the honour is given a zonal railway, whose performance is adjudged to be best among all zonal railways in the country.

The criteria for awarding the Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant Shield includes a zonal railway’s performance in several aspects such as loading of revenue and earnings, goods traffic, punctuality of traffic, passenger traffic, consequential train accidents per million train kilometres, capacity utilisation of repair workshop out-turn, coach performance, energy consumption, utilisation of motive power and railway stock, operating ratio, the economy in manpower, working of signal/telecom equipment, the progress of track renewal, stock utilisation, the performance of track machine, ticket checking, timely completion of major works, earnings and scrap disposal etc.

It is to be noted that ECoR loaded 200.85 million tonnes freight in 2019-2020 financial year, marking an increase of 4.73 per cent, as compared to the previous financial year.