BackFodder for government cows
It is time the 7th Pay Commission created a formula to strongly link salary hikes with productivity
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There is nothing nuclear about a family called the government of India. With five million serving employees and three million pensioners, it is the single biggest employer on the planet. With a lifelong job security, this bunch is fairly well-fed. It now plans to feed its dependents even better.
Just months before the national election, the Manmohan Singh government has initiated the process of revising salaries of employees. On Tuesday, the seventh Pay Commission was constituted under a retired Supreme Court judge Ashok Kumar Mathur.
There is nothing wrong in paying any employee anywhere—in government or in the private sector—well. As long as there is a strong link between productivity and pay increases, any salary hike is justified. If this is respected, there is no reason to worry about the government’s pocket getting emptied. The work done by employees will recoup the money handed out to them.
But, this link was broken decades ago.
The government carries out important functions such as providing security (the armed forces, the paramilitary and the police are meant for that) and manning administration (the once-elite, but now shabby, civil services do that job). It is important that all these personnel be paid well and, in fact, be paid better than what the private sector pays to attract the best and the brightest to the government.
The marmalade is spread too thin.
Instead of paying the best salaries in the land to civil servants, army and police officers, the government ends up giving salary hikes to everyone: an army of peons, clerks, constables, dysfunctional teachers, factory workers…well, almost everyone in its ranks. There is no reason to do so.
This helps no one.
At the lower rungs of government, wage increases don’t keep pace with inflation and increases in the cost of living. So the government resorts to devices like periodic increases in so-called dearness allowance. But even that is not enough for this army. It is an open secret that corruption is rife in these ranks. It is this face of the government that citizens encounter first in anything official.
At the higher ranks, pay increases—even if they are high relative to the junior employees—are still nowhere near private sector salaries. The best, obviously, don’t come to the government. And that shows in everything the government does—from planning, strategizing to implementation of policy.
Three things need to be remembered:
* Equality of pay is a bad idea in government as anywhere else.
* Government officers tasked with key functions should be paid the best salaries.
* It is time the Pay Commission created a formula to strongly link salary hikes with productivity or find a way to prune the army of cows in government pay.
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