Pay Hikes Are Fine, But How About Fast-Tracking Governance Reforms

In a low-income East Delhi neighbourhood, there is a set of volunteers from civil society organisation SEWA who are busy with only helping people navigate government paperwork – birth certificates, ration cards, caste certificates, hawker/vendors licences.

What is there to navigate, one may well ask, as I did.

A lot, apparently.

Take the example of the birth certificate. For children born before 1999, the parents need to provide proof that they have been living in Delhi before that year. The parents – casual labourers, workers, domestic servants, street vendors – not only have to run around for this, but have to deal with absent babus, rude babus, unhelpful babus, who will not explain procedures properly.

This meant repeated trips, which cut into their earnings.

So SEWA, which started off organising people into cooperatives, has to help them.

At the other end of Delhi, in a middle class apartment cluster, residents have not received water bills for well over a year. Water was being supplied by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) till March 2015, after which the Delhi Jal Board took over the task.

The last bill the residents paid was for March 2015. Nobody has come to take down meter readings. Even when DDA was in charge, meter readings were not done regularly, bills came once in six months, mistakes were made and people were forced to make a trip to the local office to get the bills corrected.

Talk to businessmen about the initiatives taken by the Narendra Modi government as well as several state governments – scything forms, making approvals time-bound, putting processes online – and they will tell you the myriad ways in which the clerical staff find loopholes and continue to harass them. Complaints to the political bosses and senior bureaucracy don’t help beyond a point.

Tell the people who have to deal with babudom that government employees are getting pay hikes and how this will give a boost to the economy and they will ask just two questions. One, why on earth? Two, will this make them work better?

For far too long has the argument been peddled that government salaries need to be competitive in order to improve efficiency. Yet pay commission after pay commission hikes employee compensation and efficiency keeps moving south.

In any case, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad study for the Seventh Pay Commission busted the myth that government employees are under-paid relative to their private sector counterparts. The study showed that across levels – from drivers, peons and plumbers to teachers and nurses to doctors and engineers, government and public sector employees are far better paid. But they are far less accountable.

There are pockets of excellence, there are individuals who go beyond the call of duty, but overall the impression of the government employees is that of an over-paid, under-worked force. And yet there are sections within the government who are under-paid and over-worked. Both groups are at the cutting-edge, public-facing levels and it is the ordinary citizen who has to face the consequences of this anomaly.

The migrant workers running around for a ration card, the middle class person wanting some building plans approved, the businessman who wants to export his goods are all victims of the over-paid, under-worked clerical staff.

This level of bureaucracy is also bloated in terms of numbers. Courts are under-staffed, leading to harassment for litigants.

On the other hand, crucial services like the police face a problem of under-staffing and over-work and their pay, too, is not commensurate with the long hours they put in. Is it any wonder that the face of the police that the ordinary citizen most often sees is that of a bumbling, corrupt force?

Most debates on administrative reforms following pay commission revisions are centred around the higher bureaucracy – issues like grade parity, the supremacy of the All India Services relative to provincial cadres, generalists versus specialists. These, no doubt, are important issues and very crucial to making the bureaucracy more efficient and accountable. But people want to see palpable change at the levels they deal with. They just want their interactions with the bureaucracy to be less painful and less wearisome.

Two administrative reforms have dealt with this problem and made extensive recommendations, but there has been little action. Pay hikes are fine, but it is now time to fast-track governance reforms as well.