Pistachio monkeys

BS OPINION

Well, the World Bank has just done an analysis of both private and government salaries in various sectors, and has come up with a fairly humbling finding: government employees get paid a lot more than their private sector counterparts "" 133 per cent more, to be precise. And the differential has been increasing over time.

In 1993-94, according to the Bank, government employees were paid 92 per cent more than private sector staffers.

Government nurses, for instance, have always been paid double of what private sector ones get, and sweepers and cleaners have seen their differentials go up from 79 per cent in 1993-94 to 93 per cent in 1999-00.

Government teachers were paid 75 per cent more than their private counterparts in 1993-94, today this is up to 102 per cent.

Add to this the absenteeism of government staff "" about a fourth of teachers do not attend school "" and the effective salaries of government employees go up that much more.

Not surprisingly, when a Punjab MLA conducted a study in his constituency in Bathinda earlier this year, he found that while the government spent an average of Rs 682 per month to educate one student, reputed private schools were spending between Rs 400 and 500.

And because the private schools were spending much less on salaries "" approximately 60 per cent of their costs were teachers' salaries as compared with 90 per cent for government schools "" they were able to spend more on books, computers, and the like.

And, yes, the pass percentages in the private schools were significantly higher as well. The moral of the story: you pay more for government services, and get less out of them.

Of course, having got the pistachio-eating monkeys (at such high salaries, they clearly aren't eating peanuts!), the question is what is to be done with them? VRS, desirable as it may be, is easier said than done.

So, the solution must lie in making government staffers more efficient, more accountable "" doctors, for instance, could be made eligible for promotion only when the utilisation of hospital beds goes up, and teachers when the scores of students go up.

Of course, as the Bank points out, a large part of the blame also lies in the fact that government programmes are not designed to encourage efficiency.

In Bangladesh, for instance, instead of the usual female literacy drives, the government came up with a scheme to give girls a scholarship to be deposited directly into their bank accounts if they attended school regularly, maintained passing grades and did not get married.

The schools, in turn, got a grant on the basis of the number of girl children enrolled. And female literacy shot up dramatically.

In other words, it is possible to get more out of government bureaucrats, whether they eat peanuts or pistachios.