7th Pay Commission - What about Performance Related
Pay?
Like
its predecessors, the 7th Pay Commission too has waxed
eloquent about
performance-related pay (PRP) but without suggesting concrete
and
satisfactory appraisal tools.
To be sure, PRP is any day difficult
to design and implement, especially for not-for-profit and
non-revenue
producing service organisations which most of the government
ministries
are.
However, it is the job of any commission or expert body for
that matter to go beyond generalities (lest they become
banalities) and
come up with concrete and implementable measures.
In a factory,
usually payment per unit is considered to be a strong
motivator to
produce more, either individually or as a group though in a
group there
is the danger of laggards benefitting at the expense of hard
workers.
But
at the supervisory and managerial levels, the work is mostly
qualitative, which defies precise and satisfactory
measurement so as to
be amenable to PRP. This however has not deterred the tribe
of HR
managers.
A company typically rewards excellence with commission
based on turnover or profits, though there is a carping
criticism that
profit can be increased through expedients - by sacrificing
quality,
fleecing customers, scrimping on discretionary spends like
ads and
R&D - that are inimical to long-term survival and
growth.
ESOP
or employees stock options address this concern because
managers and
directors eschew the tempting option of short-term expedients
in the
dawning realisation that they bear down on long-term
growth.
There
is no reason why a beginning cannot be made with the Indian
Railways,
the largest employer, by corporatising all its divisions and
rewarding
employees through PRP such as profitability, turnover, ESOP,
etc.
Tax
departments and its officials too can be appraised on the
strength of
tax collections, though target-setting at the pain of
repressive
measures must be eschewed. The system of rewards based as
percentage of
tax collected from crooks, practised widely when the late VP
Singh was
finance minister, is worthy of emulation despite the fear of
harassment
because India has an independent judiciary to check high-
handedness.
And
non-revenue producing departments and ministries perforce
have to be
appraised on non-revenue touchstones. Home ministry, human
resources
ministry etc. are the quintessential pure-play service
organisations
sans revenue.
But all such departments can be judged by the
quality of services they render to the public as evidenced by
feedback
from them. RTI queries are often probing and result in court
proceedings. A department and an officer can be judged on the
basis of
public perception of his performance and response to
queries.
That
is why RTI should never be rolled back, though there is a
view that it
often works at cross purposes with the official secrets law
despite the
exceptions provided to cocoon government and its employees
from public
scrutiny, mainly on security grounds.
A dispassionate appraisal of
government employees is also marred by political
interference. Location
of a railway station or introduction of a train on an
uneconomic route
etc. happen, thanks to political interference. Transfer of
key police
personnel and unbalanced budgets once again take place,
thanks to
cynical political considerations and interference.
It would
therefore not be wrong to pine for the American-style
presidential
system where government departments are administered by
secretaries
handpicked by the president and who generally are not
politicians.
It
is the US president who is answerable to the Congress and
not the
secretaries at the helm of each ministry, but they obviously
can
continue only if they retain the president's confidence. Such
a
dispensation lends itself to appraisal of the entire ministry
including
the minister at the helm.
In the Westminster-style parliamentary
system India has adopted on the other hand, political
interference is
ingrained and cannot be wished away unless the Prime Minister
leads by
example and reads the riot act to his ministers.
Despite the
seemingly insurmountable difficulties, successive pay
commissions have
been guilty of skirting the issue and holding out just
homilies, whereas
their job was to get down to brass-tacks.
Source:
dailyo
