WEDNESDAY, MAY 08, 2024
Even as the Goa government has resolved to adopt austerity measures, academics and economists believe that it is too little too late. They felt that this should have come much before the COVID-19 lockdown as the streams for revenue were drying out and the State was drawing an overdraft from the government reserves to pay salaries to its employees.
Dr Ajit Parulekar, director of Goa Institute of Management said, “If we stop infrastructure growth it’s going to be a disaster. Infrastructure is the backbone for growth, so if you break the backbone for growth do not expect for recovery to happen soon.”
Dr Parulekar went on to say that in terms of critical infrastructure there are two things - one is communication especially entire telecommunication as it is assuming and creating importance during COVID-19 lockdown. We have demonstrated that business can be done close to normal for many industries. Of course for manufacturing industries that cannot be the case but for that what one really requires is highly reliable support in terms of Internet bandwidth and uninterrupted power supply.
“I do a lot of travel and I just realised because of lockdown there was very little amount of work that I do that has been affected because I cannot travel. Almost everything, on an average I must be doing 3-12 meetings a day and none of them are physical, one or two might happen in office with some colleague but just everything, at different parts of the world, a lot of it is happening online. Lot of business and lot of work can very easily get transacted now without travelling and we have learnt it during this lockdown period,” added Dr Parulekar.
When asked on the new recruitment ban he said, “I share the views of most in the industry sector that the government is over-staffed in most of the departments and as compared to the private industry we would have less than half the number of people doing the same job. The Economic Revival Committee has also demanded to reduce the government staff. We have to get more efficiency out of those who are working for the government. Important is to re-deploy and make the systems more efficient. What is the utility of the post called peon? If we work on the computers which has already been provided there will be no manual transferring of files. To curtail expenditure we should use the available digital technology smartly.”
Dr Mridula Goel, Faculty in Economics of BITS Pilani, Goa said, “By putting restrictions on travel at this point of time means virtually nothing as no one is willing to take the risk of travel during this pandemic. Travel at the moment is at its minimum in any case for all people. Secondly, the stalling of new recruitments is a good step as we already have plenty of staff. Thirdly, on halt of capital expenditure on new projects one needs to prioritise according to its needs especially on those which are ongoing projects. Even the ongoing projects will be affected as many migrants who used to work in construction industry have already left the State.”
Dr Manoj Kamat, Professor in Finance, PhD from IIT Mumbai and Principal from Mallikarjun College, Cancona believes that with or without COVID-19 the economy of Goa was on verge of collapsing and with no capital expenditure allowed which means there will be no development taking place.
“Now the State government has an excuse of COVID-19. I do welcome these austerity measures but I do not give much value to it now as it should have been done in the month of December last year. It is like a knee jerk reaction. The government is non-committal on upcoming National Games, IFFI etc which involves huge expenditure. Within eight days of announcing that the government will go for major recruitment drives is nullified by announcement of austerity measures,” said Dr Kamat.
He further added that such austerity circulars are not new. About one month back, the State government had set up a committee on financial curtailment of expenditure and immediately after the setting up of this committee the government came up with another order in which the price limit of car purchase was extended.
“The earlier sanctioned limit for car was Rs 20 lakh which went up to Rs 30 lakh and many government departments bought new cars during that period. The incremental expenditure of the cars with new order would be around Rs 4-5 crore,” said Dr Kamat.
Associate Professor at S S Dempo College, Prof Nikhil M Varerkar believes that the government needs to be proactive rather than reactive. It is a reactive situation. These measures should have been taken when they really knew that they are not in a position to build other revenue streams after closure of mining and shrinking footfalls in the tourism sector.
“They should have had definitely cut down on wasteful expenditure. There is definitely needed a full rationalisation of the government because at the moment, everybody is aware that several government departments have got surplus staff. So, without rationalising it, recruiting new and adding to the tax-payers burden was definitely not a prudent way of going ahead. The government is struggling with deficit and they are borrowing to pay salaries. Imagine a situation for a State like Goa, which was at one point in time a surplus state, today they have to borrow money and pay salaries, which is a very bad sign of economic health,” added Prof Varerkar.
