VI Pay Commission – pay the babus well but reduce the size
The government servant in India is grossly underpaid. The top-most civil servant, the Cabinet Secretary gets about Rs. 50,000/- a month and that is what an upstart fresh graduate can earn. But can the government afford to pay so much to its employees? In some states the entire revenue is spent on staff salaries. Is government all about paying salaries? But low salaries and a great amount of discretionary power can lead to undesirable results.
What is the solution? Reducing the size of the government drastically may be one solution. Look at a typical Central Excise zone. You have a Chief Commissioner, eight to ten commissioners, 50 Additional Commissioners, 100 Assistant Commissioners, 600 Superintendents, 400 inspectors, 50 clerks and a large number of sepoys. What do they all do? Where do they all sit? Half of them have no seats and those who have really have no clue as to what to do with themselves. Inspectors and Superintendents cannot visit factories; so what they really do is clerical work. The closest they get to an executive work is protocol. Maybe the whole department can be effectively managed by a Commissioner for the whole country and about a hundred inspectors. Then the Commissioner can be paid a Crore of Rupees a year and each inspector can be paid Rs. Ten lakhs per year. So the question is whether the government should remain an employment agency giving low salaries to a large number of employees or be a governing body with few well paid employees? However much the government servants deserve a decent salary, the fact is that the government cannot afford to pay huge salaries to an army of workforce.