Promises To Keep

Indian Telecom Service (ITS) members will go on mass casual leave and wear black badges to protest against the appointment of a non-technical person as the new secretary, department of telecom services. But who will wear black badges against decisions of the communications minister?

Ram Vilas Paswan has carried the freebie culture from the railways to his new portfolio. Altogether 3.2 lakh employees of the departments of telecom and telecom services will have rent-free telephones without registration or installation charges. They will also be entitled to 75 free calls per month, in addition to a 70-day bonus.

This means a one-time loss on registration and installation charges of Rs 300 crore, plus an annual recurring expenditure of Rs 100 crore on rental waivers. There are also additional costs through congestion on operating lines and longer waiting times for those not privileged enough to work in these departments.

 

If Mr Paswan has his way, perhaps the country's entire labour force will end up working in these departments. After all, he has also promised to regularise over three lakh extra-departmental employees in the department of posts and absorb them as full-time employees.

Clearly, the message of downsizing and slashing government expenditure has not percolated through. The telecom secretary has made a vain attempt to justify the minister's decision through an apparently rhetorical question. Don't commercial organisations also offer benefits to their employees? They do.

But as he should well know, these departments haven't yet been corporatised or privatised. Had that been the case and had shareholders voted these perks, no one would have objected. In the present case, shareholders (the country at large) are not being asked and will be forced to bear the costs resulting from a minister's whims.

These and several other recent decisions do not say much about the quality of cabinet ministers or governance in the country. At another minister's whim, aircraft are diverted to Patna and Air India's divestment plans need to be whitewashed. The first decision taken by the new agriculture minister is not an issue from the pending agenda of agricultural reform, all required to ensure that they make a dent on poverty and unemployment, but a decision to ban Pepsi and Coke from the agriculture ministry. All that Nitish Kumar is clear about is a need to hike duties on imports of agricultural products and imposition of anti-dumping duties where necessary. This is hardly the way to