Small is beautiful, and cheaper

Small is beautiful, and cheaper

Austerity begins at home for the Finance Ministry. The decks are being cleared for cutting down the size of the National Savings Organisation (NSO) to a fraction of what it used to be.

Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha in his Budget speech in Parliament announced that the staff size of National Savings Organisation would be brought down from 1,191 to a meager 25 people.

Of the total 1191, 32 are Group A officials who are selected for the National Savings Organisation through the Union Public Service Commission examinations.

About 438 officials belong to Group B services, 500 officials to Group C and 230 to Group D.

The plan outlay of the National Savings Organisation (NSO) is about Rs 10 crore, the non-plan outlay is about 12 crore.

When the staff is downsized, the National Savings Organisation is expected to cut down on the non-plan outlay by about Rs 10 crore.

The non-plan outlay of the National Savings Organisation goes towards salaries and other expenditure on the staff.

With the staff cut down to 25, the amount that goes for salaries would also come down, adding to the net savings by the first major austerity move for the Government.

Those twenty-five officials left behind would promote savings schemes, design new schemes and contribute to framing policy on small savings.

All these have been the original functions of the National Savings Organisation.As for the officials who have been working with the National Saings Organisation, the future is not very bleak.

The move means that 1,166 people would have to move out of the National Savings Organisation.

They would be sent to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) where they will wait for further posting orders.

The posting orders will come as soon as suitable vacancies originate in the Government.

Till that time, these personnel would be on the rolls of the National Savings Organisation and draw salary.

Also, an attractive Voluntary Retirement Scheme is being drawn out by the Finance Ministry and Department of Personnel and Training for the officials who are ready to leave the service.

Though maintaining that this is ‘strictly not a move to retrench’ officials, the Government is also understood to be working out another package specially for the Group C and D officials.

These officials come into the National Savings Organisation through the State Selection Board.

The package would work in the framework that these officials can be ‘adjusted’ in departments inside the state itself.

There are about 25 state regional offices of the National Savings Organisation, with the head office at Nagpur.

Every regional office is headed by a regional director, under whom are two hundred and seventy district savings officers.

They all report to the national savings commissioner in Nagpur.

Under the commissioner is a joint commissioner and three deputy commisioners.On the finer details of the scheme for cutting down the size, D. Swaroop, joint secretary in charge of the Budget in the Finance Ministry, who takes care of the administrative end of the National Savings Organisation says, ‘‘We are working out the modalities of implementing the plan of cutting down the size of the National Savings Organisation.

Only 25 members of the staff would be left.

These would be the people responsible for designing products which are various saving schemes, interest rates etc.’’

The primarily function of the National Savings Organisation, which was set up in 1948, has been to promote various small savings schemes of the Government.Out of the small savings that are made by the people of a state, about eighty percent goes back to the state as revenue.

Considering the incentive that a state has in generating as much small savings as it can.

‘‘So even the promotion of the Government schemes on small savings would be eagerly done by a state government for its own revenue generation,’’ explains an official in the Finance Ministry in charge of the National Savings Organisation (NSO).

Also the Expenditure Reforms Committee last year recommended the downsizing accordingly.

Another massive cut in size has been proposed for in the currency and coinage division, where about 1675 posts would be abolished and the division would be restructured and corporatised.

After various phase-wise cuts in the staff, the strength of the Finance Ministry staff would stand at 26,132.

Even then that would be only 0.23 per cent cut in staff by end of 2002, against an 8.5 per cent cut envisaged for the year 2001. Figures also show that the expenditure on staff only goes up by 6 per cent despite the cuts.

The Central Governments’s staff strength will shrink from 37.7 lakh employees on March 31, 2000 to 34.5 lakh employees by end March 2001 and 34.4 lakh employees by end March 2002.