With less than eight months to go for the polls, the government has stepped on the accelerator to deliver on promises made. A key election promise of the Bharatiya Janata Party had been to make Goa ‘unemployment free’. It has not been achieved, and just two months ago when the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) had pegged Goa’s unemployment rate for March 2021 at 22.1 per cent, Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant had said the report was unrealistic and unreliable as it was fluctuating too erratically every month.
In the political world the Bharatiya Janata Party knows just how costly the ban on recruitment had turned out for the party after it was imposed in November 2016 just months before the elections of 2017. Then Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar had gambled with introducing the recommendations of the VII Pay Commission for government staff at an added cost to the exchequer of Rs 47 crore a month, becoming the first State in the country to implement the commission report, but banned fresh recruitment to meet the inflated salary bill. It was politically a huge risk and it had not given the returns that were expected.
In the ensuing elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party returned with 13 seats, down from the 21 it had won at the previous election. Parsekar himself lost that election. Much later, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party’s Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavalikar who was an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party when the recruitment ban was announced had said, that it was the recruitment ban the led to Parsekar’s defeat. In the years since then, the ban, however, was lifted in batches to allow certain recruitments to take place. Now it has been revoked completely setting the stage for employment across departments.
But, there is another issue here. In November 2016, on imposing the ban on recruitment, the government had directed departments to assess their staffing requirement and carry proper restructuring and reforms. Have these 11,000 vacancies that are to be filled arisen after this exercise? Or has this exercise even been undertaken by all departments? Goa already has a high government staff to population ratio with 1 government servant for every 22 persons, with a staff of over 61,000. The addition of 11,000 more staffers to this number will create a larger burden on the exchequer and though last year Sawant had said that with the financial position improving recruitment will start, reforms in government staffing are definitely required.
The government has promised to fill up 11,000 vacancies in its departments, and Sawant said the process would start next month once the pandemic situation improves. Such a recruitment drive would add to the State’s salary bill by another Rs 360 cr annually, if the base of the salary is kept at Rs 30,000 a month. Is the State’s financial position sound enough to meet this figure? This is a serious question.
Employment in government is what Goans aspire to and populist announcements of recruitment are sure to strike a chord with the people. This is one manner of reaching out to the youth who are currently jobless, with the promise of employment in government department. Sawant for that matter had been promising to lift the ban on recruitment since September last year. It has finally been done, so will the recruitment drive bolster the prospects of the Bharatiya Janata Party? The party apparently believes so. That, however, will depend who gets the jobs that will be opened up in the government sector.
