Letters: A government shake-up

This refers to T C A Srinivasa-Raghvan's column "Forget corruption, focus on incompetence" (Line and Length, May 3). The writer has mentioned the indolence of government employees but has not stated that instead of penalising them, the outgoing government appointed the 7th Pay Commission to give yet another boost to their perks. The country is still licking the wounds inflicted by the 5th Pay Commission, which benefited a small part of the population by pushing the rest into an abyss of unprecedented inflation. The World Bank described it as "the single largest adverse shock" to the public finance of the nation.

The new government should take three steps to shake the system. First, it should abolish the Planning Commission with a single stroke. The Commission was created by an administrative fiat 64 years ago, by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's successor, some 13 places removed, should abolish it by a similar fiat. Second, the government should disband the 7th Pay Commission. And lastly (as a symbolic step), it should abolish the system of staff cars. Bureaucrats already have their own cars financed by the government at sub-normal rates of interest - which they keep only for personal use. Incidentally, their much-maligned predecessors, both British and Indian, never enjoyed this luxury.

R C Mody New Delhi

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