Pay us but judge us not

The babudom fears that performance-linked wage hikes may lead to chamchagiri

Big bucks are welcome. Babus are unanimous on that. But performance-based incentives? The babus are not sure. In fact, most of them are skeptical or downright cynical. “How can the performance of an IAS officer be judged objectively,” a senior IAS officer in Chandigarh  asks pointedly.

“It can only be subjective,” adds a senior officer in Bangalore. “An officer’s work,” he says, “can’t be quantified. I can clear 1,000 stupid files that are not important and can be rated as a high performer and get incentives. But it is unjust to those who do meaningful work.”

The Sixth Pay Commission recommended an extra 1% increment for “high performers” whose number cannot exceed 20% of the employees of a particular grade. For the remaining 80%, the annual increment would be 2.5% of the basic. A day after the report was submitted, the officers agree on one thing: it has all the potential to significantly increase sycophancy among their lot.

“I need to butter up my boss better,” says a joint secretary in Delhi with a smile, as he sums up what he believes is even otherwise an unimpressive report.

The 20% high performers will be primarily picked by the annual confidential reports (ACRs) of the individual officers. No other parameters are clearly spelt out for now for deciding this 1% extra increment, officials point out. The ACRs are written by immediate superiors of officers, giving the boss a tighter grip over the salary increase of juniors.

Rewarding performers with hikes, notes Pratiphal Singh Beetaab, the labour commissioner of Jammu & Kashmir and a senior IAS officer, is “not practicable”. He says it could work for the field staff because those monitoring them can evaluate their work and accordingly, grant them incentives.

“But for those working in offices, this scheme will fall flat because you cannot measure their performance by checking the number of files they work on.”

Ranjan Das of Indian Institute of Calcutta says performance-linked incentives “do not hold much ground”.  To begin with, he says, the goals to reach must be fixed for employees and then incentives decided.

“The government and private sectors are not strictly comparable in the matter of performance-linked incentives,” warns Raj Kanojia, inspector-general (law & order) of West Bengal police.

“Conducting an appraisal for the large number of personnel is a gargantuan task in a sector like government,” points out Harish Bijoor, the CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults in Bangalore.

Many point out that there is already some system in place to appraise officers’ performance. Some argue that it is the disincentives that work more than incentives.

“A government employee fears bad remarks on his annual confidential record than a good one,” says an IAS officer.

Many officers in Delhi say that a more refined method for assessing an individual for inclusion in the high performers bracket should be brought in.

The commission speaks of   “multiple assessors” to increase the reliability and dependability of the assessment process. “The participation of stakeholders in the design and their institutional integration into the evaluation framework is necessary,” it says.  But such criteria have been laid out for doling out the extra 1% annual increment.

—Josy Joseph, Bhargavi Kerur, Deepak Gidwani, Sanjay Singh, Sumanta Ray Choudhuri, Jumana Shah, Ajay Bharadwaj, Ishfaq-ul-Hassan