A civil servant's salary

It was very interesting to read some of the remuneration mentioned in this article of civil servants in the US and Canada but then any comparison with these pay scales and ours would be totally unrealistic and absurd. It would have been more worthwhile if the authors had compared the pay of our civil servants with those in South Asia for a practical comparison.

The only framework for determining pay of civil servants should be the price line in the market. We must also not forget that the poor pay notwithstanding, the civil bureaucracy in Bangladesh exercises as much power as the most powerful bureaucracy anywhere for the simple fact that the arm of the government in Bangladesh reaches and controls every single household in the country. With such intrusive and all encompassing power, the pay that we give to our civil servants is the surest prescription for corruption. Take for example the top most bureaucrat of our country, the permanent secretary. Whatever his power or privilege, he takes home at the beginning of every month Tk 15,000. To take an example from the recent controversy in a Dhaka school, Tk 15,000 is the fees that that this school asked from each student.

However, our bureaucrats do not just receive their pay; they receive many perks. Again take a secretary as an example and add up in money terms his house, his car, driver, peon, personal staff, etc, etc and you would be surprised suddenly that the government spends a great amount of money for him. If you look at this dispassionately, you will find that most of these perks are nothing but massive wastage that serves nobody's purpose at all. A rational look at these perks could lead to an adjustment where these could be reduced drastically and the money saved given to the civil servant to make his pay rational and decent and even save the government a great sum of money. A look at housing and conveyance expenses of a secretary would leave no one in doubt with what I am trying to say. The commission must re-examine these perks and make adjustments there.

No matter how much the new pay scales eventually give our civil servants, it would not serve anyone's purpose for definitely the price hike that is bound to take place will negate any meagre increases by the new commission. The only way to look into this problem, and this problem is massive indeed, is to downsize the bureaucracy, privatise non-essential functions of the government and then give those who remain a salary that they can mention publicly and still save their faces.