Monkeys Deserve Peanuts

The recommendations of the 6th Pay Commission are making the news now. This reminds me of the time when the 5th Pay Commission met over a decade ago. Then, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service named Srivatsa Krishna wrote an article in The Economic Times quoting Lee Kwan Yew's dictum "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". His argument was that IAS blokes like him must be very highly paid.

I was a regular contributor to the editorial pages of ET then, and wrote a rejoinder titled "Monkeys Deserve Peanuts". It provoked wide outrage in the IAS mafia and a flurry of letters to the editor followed. Unfortunately, this was in the pre-digital era, and no electronic records exist. But I can mail photocopies to anyone interested.

Of course, my arguments were correct. The 5th Pay Commission bankrupted the State and public services did not improve at all. This scenario will be repeated again.

Babus who perform no useful work should not get paid at all. Indeed, because they produce nothing, babus are "unproductive". What is worse, many are "misproductive", causing losses to the community - like, for example, when the beat officer extorts money from all street vendors. They produce nothing, but impose costs. That is "misproductive" employment.

The greatest joke, of course, is that these misproductive types get tonnes of cash from the public treasury in order to "generate" gainful employment!

Pay hikes for this misproductive bureaucracy must be strongly opposed.

Monkeys deserve peanuts.
Sauvik Chakraverti

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