The continued propaganda of the government that there is more workforce in the government establishments than required has been exposed as bogus. In fact, there is less staff than required and the services are suffering due to this shortage.

Hindu Daily in a write up in its issue dated 30th January by Praveen Swamy has exposed the  myth of overstaffing in Government services. He has compared the staff ratio with the number of population in some countries, especially United States, which is spear-heading neo-liberalisation process. While India has only 1,622 government servants for every one lakh people, US has 7,681. If this is limited to Central Government employees, including Railways, the ratio is 0nly 257 for one lakh population, while US has got 840 staff for the same population for the Federal Government.

Eminent Economist Shri V.K.Ramachandran has stated, “One of the most important lessons of the economic history of modern nations is that the most crucial requirements of social transformation can only be delivered by the public authority. A government that does not pay for skilled personnel to deliver education, health and land reform is one that condemns its people to under-development”. This is fully applicable to the Government of India.

While the population in India is growing, the number of government employees are reducing sharply. For example while there were about six lakh workers in each Postal and Telecom Departments, it is aroung 3 lakhs only in both. In the Railways also, there has been large reduction of work-force. One reason is that contract workers are engaged in place of regular jobs to deny many rights of the workers. Despite that the number of employees are very less compared to many other countries.

It is time that we demand for recruitment of more workers in the government services.