It can be taken as official since a minister has said it, that Goa has the highest per capita employment of government servants, wherein it has one person out of every 20 that is employed in government service, while the national average is one in 140. That’s a huge difference, but evaluate it a little further and see how Goa’s ratio compares to that of Gujarat that has 1 government employee for every 249 people. A State with a population of around 1.5 million has in the region of 66,000 government employees, which for a State the size of Goa is too many.
To put it further into perspective, about 3.55 per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in government. In Goa about 4.4 per cent of the population, not the workforce, is employed in the government. Goa’s workforce is about 5.77 lakh, which means that about 11.43 per cent of it is in the government.
Merely a cursory glance at the statistics and a quick comparison with other States indicates that Goa’s government departments, corporations and aided institutions are not only overstaffed, they are actually bloated and need a fair bit of trimming, and the quicker it happens the better. But will that happen? Given that jobs in the government sector are the main incentive that politicians dangle before the electorate, no government would be willing to take a decision to cut staff, however, essential it may be. All indications now point that there should be a ban on recruitment until there is a detailed study of the actual requirement of employees, and the need for new recruitment justified.
Rather than beginning a recruitment process, the government should impose a temporary moratorium on recruitment – the kind that was imposed in late 2016 when it decided to implement the VII Pay Commission award to the employees – and use the time to work out which departments are understaffed and which have a surplus staff. This will not only help balance the bureaucracy but will also lead to a financial bonus. The State’s current monthly salary bill totals up to over Rs 272 crore without accounting for pensions, which is an additional burden of approximately Rs 13 crore. A large chuck of the State’s payments every month go on paying the salaries of the staff, which means that there has to be some rationalisation in the staffing pattern.
It is unfortunate that despite such a large staff, the quality of service has never improved in the State. Accountability is yet to percolate down to the staff and citizens still complain of having to make umpteen trips to the government offices for every little task. Worse, the government does go out of its way to extend the services of its favourites, an act that denies promotion to others and adds to the numbers in workers and to the financial burden of the government.
Despite the overstaffing, there is the constant complaint from every department that it is short staffed and the government is also looking to recruit more employees, even as the queue of aspirants grows longer. During the last Assembly session the Chief Minister had announced that the recruitment process would start by August. While it is politically expedient to make such statements, is it economically viable for the State? This consideration is often ignored as the politicians in power look at the electoral victory recruitment can bring them. Is there anybody out there in the political milieu who will take up the challenge of trimming the government workforce?
