When finance minister Arun Jaitley said, over the weekend at the Times Literary Festival, that implementing awards like OROP or the 7th Pay Commission were at the cost of areas like irrigation or poverty alleviation, what he never explained was why the pay panel bill was so high—and why it can’t be fixed by just moving to, as suggested by the 7th pay panel chief Justice AK Mathur, an annual private sector-like exercise. While no one will grudge paying a top government banker or a Secretary more, most government jobs comprise the lower grades where salaries are already 3-4 times that of the private sector. Most people know the government pays a lot more than the private sector at lower levels, but what’s interesting is by just how much—the 7th pay panel got IIM Ahmedabad to do a comprehensive mapping of government vs PSU vs private sector salaries across several types of jobs, and across various years of experience, and the results are frightening when you look at the quality of service got for the vastly higher government pay.

A government school teacher, before the pay panel award, with no experience gets paid R52,000 as compared to a mere R19,000 (at the top end) in the private sector—the difference only widens when, after 25 years of service, they get paid, respectively R1,12,000 and R38,500; and the ASER study tells you how government school children are a lot less proficient than private ones. A fresh government nurse gets 3.4 times her private sector counterpart, a driver 1.8-2 times. It pays a lot more to be a doctor in a government hospital if you’re an MBBS but as the skill levels rise—to an MD or an MS—private jobs are far better. Fixing this is not going to be possible since no one is going to take a salary cut, so the only way out is to stop recruitment in certain jobs and hire staffers on fixed contracts, much like in the private sector—various states have been doing this for years for teaching staff, for instance. This will create two categories of government employees—the overpaid and the rightly-paid—but there is no other option.