The Pay Commission is meant to be not just a body to enhance the compensation to public servants but also a forum to recommend steps to be taken to make administration efficient and cost effective. Even though over the years successive commissions comprising judicial officers and civil servants have succeeded in enhancing the emoluments to public servants, resulting in the lion's share of state and central revenue being spent on salaries and pensions of government employees, precious little has been done to improve the quality of delivery of services. Government servants ask for enhanced wages and the commission whose members have vested interests in the form of perks and pensions in the final award, are only too anxious to comply with the demands.
There appears to be no mandate to the Commission as to how much should be spent on wages and pensions out of the total revenue. A large number of departments and administrative units are created just to satisfy various interests and over the years the number of public servants has increased to unmanageable levels. If this trend continues, the country will be crushed by the weight of its own civil services. In the long-term interest of the country, the government could do well to reconstitute the Seventh Pay Commission duly including specialists in economics, human resources and systems management. New systems and procedures commensurate with recent developments in information and communication technology should be introduced and obsolete services and disciplinary rules should be discarded to make administration more dynamic and result oriented.
P S Pandyan, Chennai
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