EDITORIALS

decEMBER 5, 2015 vol l no 49 EPW Economic & Political Weekly8

Public Service and Salaries

Too much attention is given to government salaries and too little to government services.

It speaks volumes about the priorities in our discourse on economic policy matters that the public comments on the Seventh Pay Commission (SPC) have centred on the fi scal

i mplications of the recommendations. What will be the addi-tional “burden” on the Government of India? What impact will it have on the fi scal defi cit? True, the pay commission’s terms of reference have to deal with the recommending levels of emolu-ments for the Government of India’s 3.3 million personnel as well as the large population of pensioners. However, the publi-cation of this once-in-a-decade report was an opportunity for public debate on the role of the government in providing public services, the fi nancial cost of doing so, the accountability of the government servant and the performance of personnel at d ifferent levels and in different areas. That, unfortunately, has not happened.

For the record, with the central government accepting the recommendations of the SPC and deciding to implement them from January 2016, its total expenditure in 2016–17 will go up by Rs 68,400 crore as additional outlay on salaries and allow-ances and by Rs 33,700 crore on pensions, or by a total of Rs 1,02,100 crore, with an overall one-off increase of 23.55% over the business-as-usual projections. The SPC had its eye on the fi scal impact, for the additional expenditure will be equiva-lent to 0.65% of gross domestic product (GDP), compared to the higher increase of 0.77% of GDP as followed from the accept-ance of the Sixth Pay Commission a decade ago. Implementa-tion of the Sixth Pay Commission’s recommendations had led to a substantial rise in emoluments at many levels, and with their adoption by state governments, para-state organisations and even educational institutions, the overall fi nancial impact was considerable. The fi nancial impact this time will be less but the implications for the state governments are yet to be worked out. Since the focus for the past two decades has been on how to contain government expenditure, the outcome naturally has been on reducing the staff strength of the Government of India in the aggregate. According to the SPC, sanctioned staff strength reached a peak of 41.76 lakh in 1994 and declined to 38.90 lakh in 2014 (though the fall seems to have been largely on account of the corporatisation of BSNL). There is also an increasing unwillingness to fi ll up posts: 14% of the sanctioned posts had not been fi lled in 2006, 17% in 2010 and 18% in 2014. The central government is working towards further reducing staff strength and simultaneously increasing the use of contract labour.

But what does that mean for the range and quality of services that the government is to offer? It is instructive that according to the SPC report, in the United States there are 668 civilian federal government employees for every 1,00,000 of the population, while there are only 139 civilian central government employees per 1,00,000 in India. It is also instruc-tive that the one ministry which has seen an increase in per-sonnel in recent years is the Ministry of Home Affairs, a refl ec-tion of the growing size of the security forces directly under this ministry.

In the obsession to control government expenditure, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the state in India—at the state and central levels—is actually providing too little of public services, to expand which one would need larger personnel strength. The issue does not receive attention or favour because the citizen regularly encounters a particularly ugly face of the gov-ernment: unresponsive, unaccountable and corrupt. This is true of the lowly offi cial in a zilla land records offi ce who h arasses a farmer seeking authentication of his ownership of land to a senior offi cial in charge of regulations denying a fi rm the clearances due to it.

Over decades, the face of the Indian “babu” has turned from being a “public” servant to one who works for “private” benefi ts, if not in pecuniary terms then to enjoy the luxury of permanent employment with a load of benefi ts without in any way provid-ing public service. Yet, this broad brush characterisation of gov-ernment servants overlooks the commitment and dedication shown by many lakhs of government servants, from the worker in the primary healthcare centre to the doctor in public hos-pitals who struggle without adequate funds to provide e ssential services, though many of them could earn far more in the private sector. A good part of the responsibility for government servants having such a poor reputation in the public eye is their own. And this has played into the hands of policymakers who seek to strip the state in India even more of its public functions and hand them over to the private sector.

It is time, therefore, the public discourse on the government servant shifts from just her emoluments to the role she plays in providing essential services, her accountability to the citizen, the need to increase the number of public servants like her who are too few in important areas (especially in social services) and of course to a discussion of the salary that she needs in order to live a decent life.