Editorial

Editorial

The bloated public service

Former Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel, speaking on the budget debate, said that Sri Lanka’s public service was three times as big as it should be - thrice the size of the British public service. A "bloated administrative service," he called it, "and a very inefficient one." With the air of a conjurer pulling out a rabbit out of his top hat, de Mel exclaimed: "Do you know we have three times as many public servants as the whole of Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined? We have the highest number of public servants per capita in any country in the world...."

De Mel, who was a member of the former Ceylon Civil Service, should know more about this subject than the ordinary man in the street, who may not know the figures but is very well aware that the taxpayer is carrying a huge burden on account of the government administration. The minister, who blamed all governments from Independence for the size and state of the public service, said it was one of the "biggest problems" the country faced and was quick to add the disclaimer that "this government" was not responsible for this sorry state.

"This government," certainly, has not acted to improve the situation by appointing what is probably the world’s biggest cabinet. That apart, what is being done to meet the situation? The answer to that question is "sweet nothing." That is the sorry situation about which de Mel made no public comment. It is not only the size, the inefficiency and the cost of the public service alone that is worrying - the pensions bill too is growing to unaffordable proportions. Dr. N. M. Perera as finance minister in the seventies had the vision and the courage to propose that pensions be restricted to those then in service and new entrants join a contributory Provident Fund to which both employer and employee would contribute.

But he could not get his populist colleagues to agree to this necessary reining of public expenditure. Such a measure would have certainly been unpopular in an influential segment of the electorate and government MPs shot down NM’s proposal in flames. Even if they didn’t, the chances are that the opposition of the day would have seized on it and said that they would continue the hallowed tradition of the non-contributory public service pensions once they came to power. No wonder Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once said that "democracy in Sri Lanka is the auctioning of non-existent resources."

It is not only the public service that is bloated. Agencies of the state outside the public service like the various boards and corporations that proliferated like mushrooms after the rain particularly after 1956 are burdened with the same problem. Governments of different shades of political opinion considered the corporations as massive employment agencies available to give their supporters the jobs they demanded. So they overloaded them like CTB buses at peak hours and the Treasury had to keep making good the huge deficits the corporations ran up. But nobody really cared and there was (and is) no thought at all about the inequity of all the people of the country having to pay for the privileges of some of the workforce employed in government service and the corporation sector.

Soon after Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected prime minister in 1994, she made a very stateswoman-like speech where she appealed to the employed in our society to think of the unemployed too when they made demands for their own betterment. Unfortunately those of us who are privileged to hold jobs think nothing of pushing to improve our own lot with no thought on the ability of the economy to deliver and at the same time embark on development projects that would generate more employment. This is true of both public and private sectors because companies too are often pushed to spend more than they can afford on their wages bills to the detriment of expansion. The recent plantation wage hike is a case in point.

Having said that, it is also necessary to point out that wage distribution in Sri Lanka is far from desirable. Given the generous terms and lavish perks that estate superintendents and their assistants enjoy, plantation workers do feel done down although conditions on the thottams have improved immeasurably from earlier times. The well appointed bungalows with their large gardens and the four labour allowances the top planters enjoyed to pay for two outdoor and two indoor servants made the conditions of the periya dorais particularly "a paradise for some" as C. Velupillai, a veteran trade unionist who was a member of the first post-Independence parliament, said in one of his poems.

Wage disparities, it must be admitted, are less than they used to be with blue collar tradesmen particularly commanding a good price partly on account of the shortage of skilled workers caused by foreign job opportunities. Even for unskilled labour, jobs demanding heavy physical work such as on construction sites can today pay more than low-level white collar employment. But all that apart, our public service as well as the corporation sector must be made leaner and more efficient. And something must be quickly done about the growing pension bill that has already become unaffordable. Influential ministers like Ronnie de Mel talking about these matters in parliament is not enough. While a quick fix may not be possible, there must be a start at least in making some kind of dent in an ever-growing problem.

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