People's Democracy

THE issue of downsizing is again one of the major mantras of our times. Everybody talks about downsizing and there is a strange notion going around that more you downsize the more efficient you are.

In fact, it is simply untrue. You cannot remove people from an organisation without putting more burdens on the people, who have remained in the organisation. You cannot, in fact, reasonably expect to make people suddenly cover up the whole work efficiently, when 20 per cent of their colleagues have been removed. In fact, the ongoing downsizing would deter efficiency. This is seen in public sector banks, where a VRS has been implemented. There are huge queues, there are immense delays, there are over worked and harassed employees, who cannot keep pace, who are therefore upset, irritated, and resentful. In other words, it does not increase efficiency; it decreases efficiency.

But there is another aspect, in fact, a larger problem, to the issue of downsizing. Implicitly, it assumes that in fact the public sector employees in India are too many relative to the population that have too much in terms of public sector work force. In fact, looking at international scenario, we have one of the lowest ratios all public sector employees to population in the world, one of the lowest in the world.

In the developed countries, this ratio is six per thousand on the average. The average even in Asia is 4.5 per thousand. In India this is only two per thousand, which is very very low internationally. Now, there is a reason why the developed countries have the public employees to population ratio of six per thousand. This is not because they like to have lot of public employees but because they need to fulfil lot of public services. Surely, nobody in India would ever actually agree that we have sufficient, adequate and efficient public services for our whole population. They are totally inadequate. They are completely inaccessible to most or the majority of our population.

For our population, we do not have enough doctors, enough teachers, enough nurses, enough administrators of hospitals, enough officers to run schools, enough people actually to ensure efficient law and order, to ensure smooth functioning and wide coverage of postal services and communications, infrastructure, ensure the basic provision of various other public services. The access of the common people to all these basic public services is the lowest in our country and various government reports testify to it. Yet the government is adamant on reducing employees in all public services. It is assuming that we have got adequate public services, which is also not true. We do not have adequate public services. We need a substantial increase in the number of employees to provide basic services and most of all.

Even the argument that downsizing is required to reduce expenditure and to ensure fiscal compression makes no sense at all. Both Yashwant Sinha and Vajpayee announced that they are giving effect 10 per cent cut of all employees in the central government in five years, by not filling up the vacancies on retirement and cutting down 2 per cent a year. How much they would save by such reduction? 10 per cent cuts in manpower means saving of 0.2 per cent of revenue expenditure, i.e. less than one fifth of one per cent of the total revenue expenditure of the government. It is nothing. The huge saving which was supposed to result from this fiscal compression doesn’t exist and what we get in return is worst public services and inadequate facilities for our population, for this completely non-existent fiscal return.

The other problem of course with privatising the whole range of public services is the issue of accountability. There is an argument that the trouble with government services in India is that it is not accountable. But, the way to deal with that problem is not to, therefore, get rid of government but to say we must try and make it accountable. We must in fact try and make our public service more responsive, more accountable to the people they serve. What is important to remember that, in fact, at least we can try to make public service accountable only till these services are with the government, the public sector. Public service in private hands or private service cannot be. A private company cannot be held accountable for not providing adequate services to people. A public sector can.

We can actually try and make our institutions more democratic to force public sector organisation to be more accountable to force greater local participation and accountability in our schools, in our basic institutions, in our local managements, and so on. For similar services under private sector you cannot think of such trial at all. Only if you can pay the price, you may have a test of such services and majority of our people would not be in a position to pay for those public services in private control. This is sure and certain.