http://www.thegoan.net/Edit/Editorials/Why-are-we-doomed-to-carry-govt-deadweight/04848.html
29 June 2013 Why are we doomed to carry govt deadweight? We have said this out loud. And it is time for Goa to rise in chorus. Can we continue to fund a salary bill of 3025 crores annually to 57,000 government employees, twenty percent of whom are officially redundant because they are non-functional. It will also be very fair to assume another twenty percent occupy positions and do jobs that merely 5 percent can do. As a newspaper that is closely watching government spends on its own people from the taxes we pay, we discovered that our financial engagement continues after government employees stop serving, officially that is. With the numbers of government employees added to the rolls with absolutely no need assessment, the financial damage last longer than their tenures. Currently the government pays pension amount of Rs 240 crores and a superannuation amount of Rs 288 crores annually, taking the retirement payout bill to Rs 528 crores. These amounts can fund Goa’s health and education. It is five times higher than the fifty crores the Chief Minister plans to give as grants cum interest free loans to fifty schools. The amounts paid as pension alone is enough to fund the government mid-day meal scheme and new schemes like foster care and for technical courses to rehabilitate sexually abused victims. Therefore, the amount that is being paid out to sustain the fat in the system is at the cost having funds available for welfare and people oriented schemes. A mere reduction of Rs 500 crores in the payouts to government servants keeps borrowings and interest on them under complete check. There were many in the government who were stunned to read the figure Rs 3025 crores as what we pay as government salaries. Senior secretaries in the government have confided that the real redundancy is far higher than twenty percent that the government admits to. “Five people do the work of twenty at middle and senior levels. That is a fact,” a senior officer remarked. The government should immediately make rationalising the government work force its top most priority. Having done that, it needs to commission an independent, international human resources (HR) agency to do an HR audit to determine the exact workforce in every department, corporation and autonomous or semi-autonomous corporation. A massive downsizing plan should then be out in force, keeping in mind the need to adapt to technologies like cutting on paper, scanning and mailing documents, the acceptability of digital signatures and a trackable file turnaround system. The target should be to downsize governance by half and you are suddenly left with Rs 2000 crores annually. Tragically the biggest impediment to this will be the system itself, where MLAs ministers and government officials will get together to ensure that a good system does not come in the way of the now established template of governance. The Congress manipulated dates on appointment letters to issue back dated job letters when the code of conduct for the assembly elections set in, in December 2011. As the election code kicked in, those who got jobs on manipulated appointment letters flooded government officers, not knowing what their jobs were. So they sat outside the offices, soaking in the sun, reading newspapers, playing carom and coming back home, while so many ordinary men and women with good degrees struggled to get call letters from companies for respectable white coloured private sector jobs, which the people of Goa do not fund with their taxes. But it’s a system for the powerful all right. It’s a system where a retired and much loved school teacher from Karmali Vilas Naik, dies waiting for his pension from the very school he served almost all his working life, while the son of the Civil Supplies minister gets another shot at applying for the post of mamlatdar at his daddy dearest’s civil supplies department, after missing out in the first attempt with daddy dearest cancelling the first round. It almost reminded us of our childhood when a cricket game would be called off if the boy who owned the bats was given out. A bloated bureaucracy is the biggest impediment to our progress and yet the ruling class feels removing this impediment would knock off the biggest perks of a politician - giving government jobs to supporters and supplicants. The Goan will continue to bring you the big picture on this and perhaps more importantly, the smaller pictures and stories of deadweight in governance that we are doomed to carry, unless we the people stand up now. =========