Indian Railways planning to hire for one lakh vacancies in coming months is said to be the world’s largest recruitment drive. The event has one more distinction. It is the first major recruitment for government jobs to be conducted by a private company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
The online recruitment conducted by a private company is expected to bring transparency to government hiring which often attracts charges of corruption, bias and inefficiency. TCS also conducts a few of India's most prestigious entrance tests such as Common Aptitude Test (CAT) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) on behalf of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the All India Engineering Entrance Exam.
The railways has received more than two crore applications for nearly one lakh jobs. TCS will be the technology partner of the railways for phase-wise online examinations starting from August 9, according to a Business Standard report. TCS would hold the test through its recruitment division, TCS iON while two other private companies would manage the back-end operations. The Railway Recruitment Board has received 4.75 million applications against the 26,502 vacancies of assistant loco pilots (ALPs) and technicians (Level-2), and 19 million applications against the 62,907 vacancies for Level 1 (erstwhile Group D).
In 2015, the railways had tied up with TCS to pilot a system to conduct its recruitment exams online to introduce transparency. The pilot ran on TCS’s iON-cloud platform. The exam management tool allows secured question paper creation and distribution.
Last year, Tata Consultancy Services planned to run massive open online courses and administering the written component of driving tests as it grew its iON cloud platform, according to a 2017 ET report.
In 2011, TCS wanted to build a simpler and far cheaper version of the enterprise resource planning product used by large companies. It expected the cloud-based product to generate $1 billion in sales by 2016, with a target market size currently pegged at more than 30 million small and medium businesses (SMBs). But working with SMBs in India was challenging and the revenue target was shelved. TCS saw greater success in manufacturing and in education. From its growth in education, came its move to managing exams.
In 2016, TCS assessed 85 million candidates. It also managed assessment of 1.94 lakh candidates—the largest ever—in a single sitting. TCS is now selling its iON cloud platform in many foreign countries such as Japan and Ireland.