Sri Lanka has one of the largest public service cadres in the world for a population of 20 million people. Despite that the public service keeps growing and growing to accommodate the political boys and girls. Sri Lanka has around 1 public servant for every 17 people, India it is 1 public servant for around 85 people and in the UK it is over 100 people. Sri Lanka has an unproductive public service for many reasons. Firstly, there is no skills/job matching that takes place, secondly, no goals are set and no evaluation of output takes place and thirdly, the minister in charge is not too interested in seeing that they work.

As a result successive governments have wasted taxpayers money that could have been channeled for infrastructure development. Take Singapore a country we love to emulate, the seemingly miraculous growth in the 80s and 90s was directly attributed to the high quality of its institutions and the competence of its civil service.

The Singaporean civil servants were highly skilled, dynamic people, who were forward looking, took a broad view of the development process and found the best possible way to achieve the wishes of the people. As a result Singapore developed a civil service that was proud of its record as an independent service and public servants capable of working with the private sector rather than against it.

Where as in Sri Lanka over the years the Public Service lost its professional edge and became a service for the politicians to play with rather than be of service to the people. And also a public service that prefers to tell why things cannot be done rather than offer solutions to achieve the wishes of the people.

Future Success

Therefore a highly motivated public service will be a key element to our future success. What Sri Lanka needs is, like in Singapore, a powerful, competent and dynamic – technocratic bureaucracy, shielded from political pressure to devise and implement well-honed interventions. While we need authoritarian leaders, they also must be willing to grant a voice and genuine authority to a competent technocratic elite and key elements in the private sector.

Our leaders must realize that economic development is impossible without the cooperation of the private sector. Because, if business prospers, then more money will come into the government coffers for public welfare.

That means better salaries for the public servants. Therefore, the government needs to create a culture where everyone has an interest in seeing progress and a public service that works with the private sector rather than against it. The government to establish their legitimacy and win the support of society at large has to promote the principle of shared growth, promising in effect that as the economy expands, all groups will benefit. But sharing growth raises serious coordination problems. To tackle these complex coordination problems, the government needs to either reestablish or set up independent institutions and mechanisms to reassure the public servants and other competing groups that each would be shielded from political victimization and benefit from multiple opportunities.

Building a competent service

Therefore what the government should do is to build a competent, dynamic, honest and relatively young technocratic cadre and insulate them from political interference. If not, there is no way that the government can convince and win the cooperation of the business community to share the benefits of growth with the middle class and the poorer classes.

In fact, in many NICs, competent technocrats have helped their leaders to devise a credible economic strategy and thereby win the economic war. In order to foster an effective bureaucracy, the current administration, in addition to tapping the traditionally accorded public servants in the current administrative service, would also have to employ numerous other mechanisms to increase the appeal of a public service career, thereby heightening competition and improving the pool of applicants. Getting retired people will only add capacity to the public service only in the short term.

The government therefore needs to have a system to attract young talent and ensure only the best get accelerated promotions. The overall principle long term should be to pay salaries competitive with the private sector, recruitment and promotion should be merit based and those who make it to the top on merit should be amply rewarded. In government, as in nearly everything else, you get what you pay for. There is ample research to show that more favourably the total compensation package compares with the private sector the better the quality of the public service. Not surprisingly, Singapore, which is widely perceived to have the region’s most competent and upright bureaucracy, pays its bureaucrats best.

In economies where public sector wages are good, if not equal to the private sector, prestige will persuade some talented individuals to forego higher earnings in the private sector. However, prestige can only be enhanced by having a highly competitive, merit based recruitment and promotion process.

The retirement plan, a benefit normally not available in the private sector except in large companies could also be an incentive to join the public sector, provided a proper working environment is created. So the trick for the government is to hit on a combination that will attract competent individuals to the public service. On the other hand, if we do not have the necessary talent in Sri Lanka, we may have to get the assistance of foreign governments to either second people or provide the right exposure to our people or perhaps even engage the services of top consultants to develop people capacity and the systems we need.

An effective public service will enable the government to establish legal and regulatory structures that are generally hospitable to private investment and public servants who consider their primary role is to help the private sector to thrive an serve the public.

If our political elite is to do something positive for a change it is imperative that the government develops a competent public service that will help them to listen and to deal with the appeals of the marginal and the minorities which will facilitate the nation building process we desperately need.