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The caretaker Finance Minister has taken care to make himself popular with the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, taking advantage of th...

The caretaker Finance Minister has taken care to make himself popular with the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, taking advantage of the Fifth Pay Commission recommendations. Ironically, these first became controversial when the unions alleged that they were quot;by the IAS and for the IASquot;.

It might be recalled that the package was forced upon the nation by the threat of an indefinite strike that would have stopped the work of government across the country. It was a shameful imposition, at a time when common sense dictated quite the opposite layoffs in government to prevent it from becoming the biggest rehabilitation agency in the country.

And it came about because two worthies in the floridly named Joint Consultative Machinery Ram Vilas Paswan and Indrajit Gupta were unnaturally close to the very unions they were supposed to be negotiating with on behalf of the government. It is doubly shameful that the Finance Minister has taken recourse to this highly questionable document in an attempt to curryfavour.

In the two years since the fracas over the Fifth Pay Commission, no government has seen fit to give any importance to what should have been their first consideration: reducing the strength of the government services and streamlining their operations. The recommendations were expected to bring an additional burden of Rs 13,500 crore on an already beleaguered exchequer and were aimed at 54 lakh employees, many of them notably underemployed. Any government, whatever its political compulsions, should have been interested in pruning those numbers to more manageable proportions in a nod to its economic compulsions.

The incumbent Finance Minister did make that nod, promising that his own ministry would divest itself of a secretary-level post. But the spirit does not seem to have been willing. When a post in banking fell vacant, he had it filled with exemplary despatch.

It would be unreasonable to object to pay hikes in government. It is a global trend and has been found to result in higher efficiencyand more professionalism. But the national budget is not a bottomless treasury. A hike in one quarter has to be offset by layoffs in another. Yet another global trend, but one that certainly has no echo in the Indian government.

Restructuring and redeploying manpower assets will have to be one of the priorities of whatever formation comes into power later this year. The days when more people were required to deal with a rising population are over.

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Now, fewer hands do the work of many. The government is deploying technology in various areas. It has to be prepared to deal with the redundancies that will result as well. It has to put together a package that will either allow for retrenchment or sweep retired men8217;s boots out of the way without raising political hackles. The Fifth Pay Commission was a retrograde step precisely because it became instantly politicised. When it thinks next about the terms of government employment, it will have to find a way to make such politics unacceptable. And in themeantime, it will have to stop giving out confusing signals. If cutbacks are in order, the Finance Minister should not upsize, using the Pay Commission recommendations for a fig-leaf.