NEW DELHI, APRIL 21: Maintaining that he wanted the civil and defence services to be “properly rewarded”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said his government was committed to redressing grievances and concerns expressed over some parts of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations.

“I would like our civil and defence services to be properly rewarded. I also believe that the tax payers will not grudge anyone of us better remuneration as long as we are serving the best interests of our people, our country most efficiently,” Singh said while addressing senior officers on Civil Services Day here today.

The pay panel’s recommendations have invited criticism from defence officers and members of the Indian Police Service (IPS). While defence officers had approached Defence Minister A K Antony with their grievances and suggestions, IPS officers have been urging Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil to have anomalies in the recommendations removed.

Pointing out that the Pay Commission was part of efforts to “redress systemic deficiencies”, the Prime Minister said that a mechanism had already been set in motion for hearing and redressing grievances. Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar is heading a high-level committee to look into the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission.

The Prime Minister, however, maintained that improved conditions of work “must go hand in hand with improvement in work on the ground”. He seemed to make an indirect reference to sections of officers going public with their disappointment with the pay commission report. While the government was committed to the welfare of the services, he also expected the “highest standards of discipline and decorum from our civil servants”.

He used the occasion to deliver a message to the bureaucracy — that the civil services had to be fair, honest and efficient so that public perception about the government could be changed. The poor and the under privileged complained that the government was biased against them; the business class complained that the government was “excessively intrusive and slow to act” while the middle class complained that it was “corrupt and unresponsive”, he said.

“We must introspect and recognise that there is a great deal of public dissatisfaction with the functioning of government, at all levels of government. This challenge the civil service must endeavour to address as a collective entity,” he said. He added that the government also needed to improve its “human face” as it moved away from running industries and controlling economic activity to managing public services delivery.

Calling for special attention must be paid to the needs of the poor, particularly the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, minorities, women and children, the Prime Minister sought a “renewed commitment to placing oneself on the side of the disadvantaged in society.”

He sought the bureaucracy’s help to improve the performance of the government’s flagship programmes. The initial feedback on schemes like Bharat Nirman, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, National Rural Health Mission and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan were “generally positive though not uniform across states”, he pointed out.

There were areas like food distribution, nutrition and basic health services where a lot more needed to be done. “We have increased outlays, so the financial constraint has eased, but it is your managerial challenge to ensure that the outcomes are also now better than ever before,” he told the gathering.