Pay and performance

The formation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government with Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister in May 2004 had inspired the hope among civil servants that administrative reforms would now receive the attention they deserved. But there was little action until the government announced recently its intention to introduce legislation that would restrict the number of transfers a civil servant can be subjected to in a given period of time""frequent and ad hoc transfers being the weapon most commonly used by state-level politicians to bring civil servants to heel. While such legislation should make a difference, it addresses only one issue, whereas the administrative system is dysfunctional in a hundred ways; hence the failure of delivery mechanisms, no matter what the programme (food for work, health for all, universal literacy, etc). What is needed is to make the administrative machinery an accountable and effective tool of governance. But the UPA government's record so far in implementing administrative reforms of any significance is poor.

The issue has gained currency because a new Pay Commission is raising questions about the size and scope of government, even as it considers how much government employees should be paid. The two sets of issues are linked, of course. With over 3.5 million employees on the rolls of the central government, the size of the civil service continues to remain bloated. The Vajpayee government had tried to implement the Geethakrishnan Committee's report on administrative reforms, but abandoned it in the face of opposition to the abolition of 2,000 posts of senior officers in central ministries and the winding up of some departments. The UPA government has not even attempted any such exercise.

While saving on costs by eliminating superfluous posts is required, the more important issue is enforcing accountability""for only that can lead to improvement in the delivery of government services. The Right to Information Act has made some difference here. Information on how the government machinery functions is now available and this has certainly instilled a greater sense of responsibility among officers. But accountability is a much broader issue and has not been addressed because it is seemingly impossible to introduce disincentives and penalties.

As important as accountability is the need to improve the quality of manpower. That in turn depends on how much civil servants are paid. With the Sixth Pay Commission having been appointed, civil servants can hope for a revision of their pay. While that is certainly required in the higher echelons (and the financial impact of this would be small), it is far from clear that a general pay hike is needed in the lower rungs""where the total package of benefits compares well with what the market offers, and where performance benchmarks are mostly non-operational. Along with higher pay should come a more appropriate way of evaluating the performance of government employees, a system for weeding out employees who are below par or dishonest, and an option for civil servants to build expertise in the domain of their choice. It is reassuring that the secretariat of the Sixth Pay Commission has chosen to consider these issues, and it must be hoped that it will not follow the naïve approach of its predecessor, which merely hoped for a steady reduction in the size of the government and did not link that mandatorily to the pay hikes it recommended.