The national pay commission may drop the idea of hiking salaries of government employees from a point of view that it may lead to higher inflation.
Instead, the commission is contemplating improved non-financial benefits such as insurance facilities, tuition fee allowance and free textbooks for the children of the employees.
After the third meeting of the commission yesterday, Chairman Mohammad Farashuddin told reporters that the aim was to improve efficiency of government staffs without putting pressure on the consumer price index.
According to a government circular, one of the tasks of the National Pay and Services Commission – formed last year –is to find a way to adjust the salaries of government employees with prevailing inflation rates.
The rate of inflation in the country for March 2014 is 7.48%, says Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. For the same month, inflation in the USA is 1.1%, and in the UK 1.7%. In India, inflation for February 2014 was 6.73%.
The commission has put up two sets of questionnaires on the finance ministry’s website seeking opinions and recommendations from the public servants about the next pay structure.
In those questionnaires, there are several questions where respondents are asked to give their opinions on whether the next pay structure should take into consideration the prevailing inflationary pressures.
After yesterday’s meeting, Farashuddin said: “There were discussions on non-financial benefits such as providing for tuition fees of schools and colleges and giving
free textbooks and study materials to the children of the employees... We have also discussed short term insurance facilities for the employees alongside salaries. However, all these are still at the initial stage of consideration.”
Binayak Sen, research director of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, told the meeting that raising salaries and benefits would not solve the problem of living standards; rather the government needed to make sure that efficient and skilled people were recruited, meeting sources said.
Then again, citing the example of Indian public servants and university professors many of whosemonthly salaries are as much as Rs80,000-Rs85,000 in addition to other facilities, Sen stressed the need for good pay to attract efficient people into the government sector.
In Bangladesh, the pay scale for the senior most government employees is around Tk40,000 apart from other benefits.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith also reportedly agreed with the notion that just like the private sector, “talented” people should also work in the public sector.
One member of the committee pointed out that senior government staffs should enjoy better insurance policies than the younger ones.
Another member reportedly said the government employees should start contributing towards a housing fund from the beginning of their services so that they could own houses by the end of their job tenures.
According to meeting sources, the idea was that if civil servants could be sure that they would own houses at the end of their jobs, they would not resort to corruption.
After the meeting, former central bank governor Farashuddin told reporters that it would not be possible for the commission to submit the report by the June deadline. He said the commission had already applied for extension and hoped to place the report by December 2015.
The 17-member pay commission was formed in November last year to come up with a new pay scale for 12 lakh government employees.
