THE new pay scale for government servants as approved by the cabinet on Monday will almost double their basic pay in an unprecedented move; which most observers believe to have been done to keep the members of the civil bureaucracy government friendly. The new pay scale will cost the government an additional expenditure of Tk 15,904 crore in the current fiscal and it will further increase the additional cost to Tk 23,828 crore from next year. The government did not make disclosure of what the total amount of pay and allowances it will pay under the new pay scale but it appears that the bigger part of the national budget will go for paying the bureaucracy to buy their allegiance to the government now suffering from a lingering question of electoral legitimacy.Announcing the decision, the cabinet secretary said that ‘the government revenue is increasing every year and hence the government won’t be under any pressure to implement the new scale.’ But the reasoning appears quite strange and self-defeating. It is true that the government revenue is increasing but rather under almost coercive measures like the recent rise in gas and electricity prices and such other hikes in government services costs forcing the people to pay. Experts find no valid reasons for a rise in gas and electricity price. The government is earning huge profit from gas marketing in recent years. Fuel oil prices have also dropped by two-thirds recently in international market; which is used to run fuel fired power plants to justify the rise in electricity price. This is how the government revenue is increasing, as many believe forcing the common people to pay to wealthy power producers and for government services engrossed by corruptions and misuse of funds in government contracts. What the new pay scale shows is that the government is not bothering at all of its impact on the cost of living of the poor and ordinary people. The government is only adding new cost and levies to collect more income to pay bureaucracy to keep it happy.Under the new pay scale officers in the first grade will get Tk 78,000 per month basic salary up from Tk 40,000 while the income of the ordinary people will remain unchanged. Senior secretaries and persons in equivalent positions will get Tk 86,000 fixed and secretaries will get Tk 82,000. Government servants will also get a Bengali New Year bonus, in addition to two existing festival bonuses. It immediately shows the income and purchasing power gap of the government servants with the common people will be too big now with their fixed income in small businesses or working in the private sector. Poor, old and retired people will be hard hit. The new salary-push inflationary pressure will be overheating the market surging prices of essentials in the market and pushing house rent up. There is a growing fear that the new pay scale will leave the common people to suffer severe distress without parallel increase of their income. To many people this pay hike when the general public is facing terrible economic hardship appears too much eagerness on the part of the government to please a special class of public servants in the hope of getting their blind loyalty. The people’s government must care first the concerns of the general public.The new pay scale seems to be indicative of the fact that this is a country of the powerful to run it with lavish pay to bureaucracy. The poor will have nothing much to expect from the state at it exists now.
