10 years, 3 salary hikes later, central govt's understaffing issues persist

According to a 2015 report, for every 100,000 people, India had 139 central government employees, compared to the US, which had 668

The central government’s expenditure on the salaries of civilian employees increased three-fold in 10 years between 2006-07 and 2016-17, even as nearly 500,000 posts remained vacant, on average, every year, according to government data.

“A poor country with weak state capacity like India, when confronted with the pressure to redistribute, had necessarily to redistribute inefficiently, using blunt and leaky instruments,” said the Economic Survey of 2016-17. State capacity refers to the government’s ability to utilise resources to deliver essential services, such as education and health.

Concerns regarding the quality of government services being affected due to understaffing were raised in the 2015