You get what you pay

For an organisation that handles exams for millions of students every year, NTA’s permanent staff of only 25 officials is exceptionally small. It relies on another 200 contractual and outsourced personnel to conduct major entrance tests to professional and graduate education.

The lean staffing shows NTA is structurally vulnerable. But such design flaws of understaffing are a challenge across several core govt functions, especially health, municipal work, enumeration – essential work that keeps the country running. Take ASHA workers, who work full jobs. But they remain ‘honorary volunteers’ – an army of trained women, unregularised, underpaid and overworked, pulled in a new direction with every new govt scheme. ASHA workers are expected to prosper on high praise, because remuneration remains measly, incentives paltry. If the backbone of rural public healthcare delivery rests on ‘volunteers’, problems are given. But govt’s argument against regularisation of such semi-skilled work, or any type of hiring, is, primarily, high wage bills. This points to a fundamental problem: how govt pay is structured.

Govt employees in lowerand mid-level jobs are very well paid, at much higher rates than market wages, inflating govt’s wage bill, and leaving govts less room to hire more teachers, nurses and municipal workers, or regularise ad hoc govt university teachers, or at the other end, workers like ASHAs. This, even though India has fewer govt employees per capita than many countries. Data for India estimates India has 27 nurses & midwives per 10k people, a far cry from fellow emerging economies such as Brazil, which has 58 nurses & midwives, or South Africa, with 42 nurses & midwives per 10k people.

Evidence of the flailing state is everywhere: in how badly exams are run, in the decrepit state of rural health centres, and in crumbling urban infra. Govts need to hire more, for better governance. To hire more, they need to lighten the bloated payout for unskilled and lowskilled jobs. GOI cannot keep relying on outsourced and contractual workers for critical jobs. Productivity and pay go together, and taxpayers and children shouldn’t have to pay the cost of govts spending heavily on low-level admin and clerical staff, peons, drivers, cleaners and other support functions.

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