Of course implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission’s recommendations will have a fiscal impact. Even if this works out to an additional 0.65 per cent of GDP — and the odds are that the estimate will prove to be understated — it would be a mistake to begrudge[bi'grú(allow unwillingly,मुश्किल से देना)] civil servants and pensioners the additional money.
It is no wonder then that our attitudes towards remuneration, of public officials, is self-contradictory. This attitude extends towards elected representatives too. there are many people who scrutinise[skroo-ti,nIz(examine,जाँच)] the accounts of non-government organisations and express shock that their staff are paid “that much”. A direct consequence[kón-si-kwun(t)s(result,परिणाम)] of this logically inconsistent attitude is that politicians who are honest have trouble maintaining themselves and their offices, civil servants yield[yee(-u)ld(give,देना)] easily to temptation and non-profits find it hard to recruit good talent.
Unfortunately, there are hardly any individuals of adequate[a-di-kwut(sufficient,पर्याप्त)] public standing to make out the unpopular case for paying public officials well. In any system, bad people do bad things and good people do good things. The system works when the balance is in favour of the good. Better pay and social prestige can, at the very least, prevent those who are good from leaving for greener, cleaner pastures. Since there is no way of isolating the good people and paying them better, it becomes necessary to pay everyone better.
Despite the perception that our government is overstaffed, the reality is that India has very low numbers of civil servants ,the federal government has 668 employees per 1,00,000 population. In comparison, the Union government employs 139.
India has one of the lowest ratios of government employees to population in the world. In a World Bank study in the late 1990s, Salvatore Schiavo-Campo, Giulio de Tommaso and Amitabha Mukherjee found that less than 1.5 per cent of India’s population was employed in government, which was behind countries such as Malaysia and Sri Lanka (4.5 per cent) and China (around 3 per cent).
So, if we are concerned about improving governance, we should be really concerned about how to add strength to the machinery of the government. When you have only around 130 police personnel and 1.2 judges per 1,00,000 population, and you need at least 200 of the former and 10 of the latter, asking whether they are being overpaid misses the point.
Today, except for a few departments, we neither appoint nor promote civil servants based on their performance. There are many other criteria — from preventing nepotism[ne-pu,ti-zum(favoritism,भाई भतीजावाद)] to promoting social justice — but the Indian government is perhaps the only organisation in the country where “doing the job well” ranks as being relatively unimportant to one’s career prospects.
Expect the next weeks and months to be consumed by debates on “edges”, panels, allowances and pensions that the various civil, paramilitary and military services get. There will be a lot of heartburn, jealousy, genuine grievances and hostility[hós'ti-lu-tee(ill-will,शत्रुता)]. These are the inevitable[i'ne-vi-tu-bul(necessary,जरुरी)] result of an unreformed bureaucracy, but of little consequence to the larger public interest.
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