Again pay department statistics show that 70 per cent of central government employees are lower grade staff. Since half of the central government employees belong to the railways, this means that group B and A officials number only about half a million. They are the ones who work the on government policies that impact on our lives. As their salary package is shoddy, they are also easy targets for those who want to swing government orders for their benefit.

But each pay commission has bowed before the majority, ignoring the differential needs of this group. To reconcile the contradictory needs, the Fifth Pay Commission created India’s biggest ever fiscal crisis. The wages and pension bill for the Centre almost doubled from Rs 218 billion to Rs 437 billion in three years. For the states, the tab shot up to Rs 890 billion from Rs 515 billion, over a slightly longer period. This has widened the difference between the non-executive grade government staff and their private sector counterparts, but has not clipped the gap between the starting pay of a civil servant and her batch mate in a private sector company. It has widened.

Incidentally improving the pay package is not the raison d’etre of Justice B.N. Srikrishna’s team. Their terms of reference say the recommendations should ‘harmonise the functioning of the central government organisations with the demands of the emerging global economic scenario”. The Fifth Pay Commision attempted some of those, like cutting the staff strength by one third, reducing the number of holidays and clubbing them together. The active unions of the government employees have, of course, effectively buried them. That work will be a very key component, to “transform the central government organisations into modern, professional and citizen-friendly entities that are dedicated to the service of the people”.