Time for a more vibrant public sector

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is reported to have expressed his disappointment over the services rendered by the Graduates that were incorporated into the Public Service as a fulfilment of a pledge given by him during the presidential campaign. On that occasion keeping with a popular mandate this administration offered thousands of unemployed graduates positions in the public sector, often creating new titles for the newcomers even though they were mainly doing clerical work previously done by less qualified personnel. This policy of the government was a deviation from the policies of the UNF government between 2001-2004, which sought to shrink the Public Service, mostly driven by the advice of the World Bank and the IMF.
With the International Monetary Fund coming up with a loan to strengthen Sri Lanka’s reserves, the time is ripe to revisit the possibility of reforming this dinosaur that we call the Public Sector.
Sri Lanka boasts of one of the largest public sectors in the world considering the ratio of public servants to the population. By recent calculations, there is one public servant to every 17 citizens in Sri Lanka, far more than the required number to serve a population of some 20 million people.
The pertinent question is whether such a large public sector has actually delivered the desired service to the people. The answer would most certainly be a firm NO. Other than being a source of employment for a significant segment of the population and thereby contributing to financial stability of their extended families, the public sector has not yielded the dividends that it should have. Instead, the cost of maintaining and sustaining such a massive public sector has become a burden on the public coffers itself. In an ironical state of affairs, it is more or less a subsidy of employment paid by the employees (the public in both cases) themselves. Though such a scenario might be popular in the short run since any notion of reforming the public sector is met with scepticism over the loss of jobs, it would most definitely not be possible to sustain such an expensive venture in the long term without dire economic consequences.
What Sri Lanka needs is a more efficient, smarter and smaller Public Sector which actually contributes to the country’s development and progress rather than being a burden on it. In an era when even a pre-schooler could type out a letter using a computer, the Sri Lankan public service clings to a battalion of stenographers in each office, as relics from a by gone era when such work on a typewriter was a highly skilled job. It is time to look at slimming the Public Sector down to give their clients, the public itself a slightly better deal. It would certainly be a relief to walk into a government office and find every one hard at work, rather than gossiping over breakfast or tea or buried in a newspaper – or worse, asleep. To this end, Sri Lanka needs to take a good hard look at ways and means by which to ensure that the large numbers of servants in the employ of the state work smarter and more productively in order to meet the challenges of development work that will prove so essential in the near future. Whilst some public sector institutions have got their act together there are many others which haven’t. Institutional and policy reforms are key in this process.
The President’s call for the public sector to be more energetic comes at a time when the country’s private sector is facing immense challenges. With the effects of the global economic downturn fast trickling down into this tiny island, private companies, despite some state support are finding it increasingly difficult to meet mounting salary bills, sky high production costs and a massive erosion of demand for many products and services. The private sector has mounted calls to scrap the Saturday half day and in an attempt at cost cutting, is hoping to cut back on staff hours even in crucial places of business such as supermarkets. It is hoped that the much needed donor funds that have been promised for rehabilitation and reconstruction in the North following the end of the military operations against the LTTE will spur the economy as a natural stimulus for both the country and the private sector. The public sector on its part cannot be mollycoddled and pampered while the private sector is endeavouring to survive in a highly challenging environment amidst global recession, its impact and local constraints.