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 organizations 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
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