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In Pay Panel Report, Windfall for Those Who Have Amassed a Lot

Hiking the salary of central government employees by a whopping 23.5 percent, is simply obscene.

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The recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission, hiking the salary of central government employees by a whopping 23.5 percent, is simply obscene. By all accounts, they are already being paid far beyond their legitimate needs. If enforcement agencies start looking into their disproportionate assets, 90% of them will get convicted. Since you cannot send them to jail, the best option is to give them a 3 percent yearly hike to take care of inflation for those who are still honest.

Pay Commission Chairman Justice (retd) AK Mathur makes a grievous error in believing that if you pay more, government employees will not be corrupt. If one understands him, the employees resort to corrupt practices because they are poor, cannot send their children to Harvard and Yale, cannot acquire commercial properties, play golf to keep themselves fit or possess Japanese cars to go to work and keep their spouses and children pampered.

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Where has the idealism behind joining the civil services and the fire to serve the society gone? Not long ago, you had officers carrying ration boxes on inspection tours, taking rides in buses to go to the office, waiting for October to buy subsidised khadi clothes for their children and earmarking Rs 500 for fuel per month to run a car. And still their children became doctors, engineers, scientists, bankers and civil servants.

Salary Hike Will Not Curb Graft

Hiking the salary of central government employees by a whopping 23.5 percent, is simply obscene.
Corruption has nothing to do with salary. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Corruption has nothing to do with salary. It is a cancer that no amount of chemotherapy can cure. It comes with your genes, your grooming and family background. It is immune to Mathur’s dangling carrot and has nothing to do with a sense of service and personal propriety.

Does anyone remember SR Sankaran, former chief secretary of Tripura, or the likes of him who practiced asceticism in public life and renounced everything that they had for the wronged and the needy? To assume that we will now have many Sankarans, equipped with a salary hike of this size is a cruel joke.

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What is vulgar is the proposed hike in the salary of the cabinet secretary. How can you even think of paying Rs 2.50 lakh to a public servant when 60% people in rural India (skilled and unskilled labourers) earn between Rs 2,500 and Rs 9,000 a month and survive on rice and potato? They are already enjoying too many privileges, perks, and facilities. Was there really a need to give them such an obese pay packet? At 62, will they be fit enough to carry the weight of this bounty in the backdrop of helplessness and poverty?

Creating Two Classes

Mathur’s suggestion to hike allowances of employees by a staggering 63% is also preposterous. You are actually creating two distinct classes of those whom you think will drive the economy by consuming wantonly and those who cannot afford to consume. You are thus preparing grounds for civil strife and a sudden spurt in economic offences. How ugly that will be, only time will tell.

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Hiking the salary of central government employees by a whopping 23.5 percent, is simply obscene.
An employee counts rupee currency notes inside a private money exchange office in New Delhi. (Photo: Reuters)

Mathur further argues that the best talents are migrating to the private sector because civil servants are not paid as well. This is bizarre. If you only want to earn money then don’t join the civil services. You don’t actually need geniuses to push files and please politicians. Let the best pursue medicine, science, communications, economics, manufacturing etc and be paid handsomely.

It is a fact that those who are average and do not have the confidence to survive in the fiercely competitive world of the private sector join the civil services because it gives them undeserving security. Till you have a foolproof system in place to judge their performance and productivity, there is no point in bleeding the exchequer.

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Ripple Effect in States

The implementation of the pay commission’s report is inevitably going to have a serious ripple effect in states. With elections always round the corner in one state or another, take it as guaranteed that employees will agitate aggressively and governments will announce a similar bonanza to buy peace and loyalty.

Consequently, new taxes will be levied to offset the revenue loss, affecting the daily lives of people who have no voice. It is difficult to imagine how RK Laxman would have drawn his common man on his sketch board, walking on potholed roads, after this report.

(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat.)

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