The government is in the middle of a balancing act, with departmental vacancies rising without any reduction in the salary and pension bill which hovers around the Rs 4000 crore mark annually. But even as the number of vacancies hit the 10,000 plus mark, the need of the hour is rightsizing jobs, not merely filling vacancies.
We simply need to evaluate whether the vacancies originally envisaged and approved were far in excess of the manpower needed to achieve target based verifiable tasks. Job creation and sanction have largely been an exercise in political wheel balancing rather than an assessment based project on the manpower needs of departments.
Therefore, 10,000 plus vacancies alone cannot be ground to push for recruitments to fill those vacancies. It is high time that a realistic, scientific, assessment is done on the requirements in each department and then restructure the real need based vacancies.
While Goa’s GDP has seen marked improvement and is likely to hit the Rs 70,000 crore mark, there is a loan liability and the payments need to be done on borrowings. The salary component of close to Rs 4000 crore is not a mean figure. This burden is being borne primarily because the sales tax collections are high but that is no real comfort because earnings as taxes should go towards settling existing loan liabilities.
Therefore the only way to reduce the salary and pension burden is to reduce the government manpower. In most cases the mounting pension bill gets buried as a part of the overall salary spends. And this is where the nerve centre of the burden is. The moment someone is in the government payroll, the latter spends on him or her for life.
While the delivery of government services according a specific time frame is also the responsibility of the government, the road to speedy delivery has to come from e-governance and better use of technology. The dependence on additional manpower is detrimental to the narrative of digital India and e-governance.
The concept of maximum governance, minimum government, will continue to work in reverse and actually slow down growth in addition in galloping salary and pension expenses, if jobs are given to fulfill political promises.
For starters the government must immediately order a professional manpower audit taking into account all the parameters including the projects at hand and Goa’s population growth.
All this can work only if there is total change in the political approach towards jobs and growth. It is still linked intrinsically to politics. The aim of every MLA and Minister is to ensure that the maximum number from their constituencies get ‘adjusted’ in their departments. These needs are inversely proportional to the department’s genuine manpower needs. More often than not, the need to get more politically linked people offsets the real needs of the department. Therefore there is a critical need to rationalize the vacancies which exist and make them realistic.
Much as we would hope that the science of jobs and vacancies remains a science, it is political science or the version of political science Goa plays, that dictates planning and decision making on this front. It is therefore prudent to pause, do an audit, rationalise job needs and then take a call on what percentage of vacancies which officially exist – 10,000 odd – need to be filled.
