combined Lower subordinate services prelims exam 2015,samveg ias

combined Lower subordinate services prelims exam 2015

Last Date for Deposition of Examination Fees in the Bank : 29.09.2015
Last Date for Receipt of Application : 03.10.2015
The U.P. Public Service Commission shall hold a Preliminary Examination at various Centres of the Districts mentioned in Appendix-2 of this advertisement for selecting suitable candidates for admission to the Combined Lower Subordinate Services (Gen. Rectt./Special Rectt. (Main) Examination 2015

No. of Vacancies:  Presently, Approximate No. of Vacancies is 470 for General Recruitment and 20 vacancies for Special Recruitment



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Seventh Pay Commission is no ogre

ts recommendations’ impact need not give us jitters because the rise in government wages will amount to only 0.8 per cent of GDP.

The report of the Seventh Pay Commission (SPC) is set to be released soon. The new pay scales will be applicable to Central government employees with effect from January 2016. Many commentators ask whether we need periodic Pay Commissions that hand out wage increases across the board. They agonise over the havoc that will be wrought on government finances. They want the workforce to be downsized. They would like pay increases to be linked to productivity. These propositions deserve careful scrutiny. The reality is more nuanced.

Critics say we don’t need a Pay Commission every ten years because salaries in government are indexed to inflation. At the lower levels, pay in the government is higher than in the private sector. These criticisms overlook the fact that, at the top-level or what is called the ‘A Grade’, the government competes for the same pool of manpower as the private sector. So do public sector companies and public institutions — banks, public sector enterprises, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and regulatory bodies — where pay levels are derived from pay in government.

The annual increment in the Central government is 3 per cent. Adding dearness allowance increases of around 5 per cent, we get an annual revision of 8 per cent. This is not good enough, because pay at the top in the private sector has increased exponentially in the post-liberalisation period.

Competition for talent

A correct comparison should, of course, be done on the basis of cost to the organisation. We need to add the market value of perquisites to salaries and compare them with packages in the private sector. We cannot and should not aim for parity with the private sector. We may settle for a certain fraction of pay but that fraction must be applied periodically if the public sector is not to lose out in the competition for talent.

True, pay scales at the lower levels of government are higher than those in the private sector. But that is unavoidable given the norm that the ratio of the minimum to maximum pay in government must be within an acceptable band. (The Sixth Pay Commission had set the ratio at 1:12). Higher pay at lower levels of government also reflects shortcomings in the private sector, such as hiring of contract labour and the lack of unionisation. They are not necessarily part of the ‘problem with government’.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of Pay Commission awards is that they play havoc with government finances. At the aggregate level, these concerns are somewhat exaggerated. Pay Commission awards typically tend to disrupt government finances for a couple of years. Thereafter, their impact is digested by the economy. Thus, pay, allowances and pension in Central government climbed from 1.9 per cent of GDP in 2001-02 to 2.3 per cent in 2009-10, following the award of the Sixth Pay Commission. By 2012-13, however, they had declined to 1.8 per cent of GDP.

This happened despite the fact that the government chose to make revisions in pay higher than those recommended by the Sixth Pay Commission.

Today, Central government pay and allowances amount to 1 per cent of GDP. State wages amount to another 4 per cent, making for a total of 5 per cent of GDP. The medium-term expenditure framework recently presented to Parliament looks at an increase in pay of 16 per cent for 2016-17 consequent to the Seventh Pay Commission award. That would amount to an increase of 0.8 per cent of GDP. This is a one-off impact. A more correct way to represent it would be to amortise it over, say, five years. Then, the annual impact on wages would be 0.16 per cent of GDP.

The medium-term fiscal policy statement presented along with the last budget indicates that pensions in 2016-17 would remain at the same level as in 2015-16, namely, 0.7 per cent of GDP. Thus, the cumulative impact of any award is hardly something that should give us insomnia.

There are a couple of riders to this. First, the government is committed to One Rank, One Pension for the armed forces. This would impose an as yet undefined burden on Central government finances. Second, while the aggregate macroeconomic impact may be bearable, the impact on particular States tends to be destabilising.

The Fourteenth Finance Commission (FFC) estimated that the share of pay and allowances in revenue expenditure of the States varied from 29 per cent to 79 per cent in 2012-13. The corresponding share at the Centre was only 13 per cent. The problem arises because since the time of the Fifth Pay Commission, there has been a trend towards convergence in pay scales. The FFC, therefore, recommended that the Centre should consult the States in drawing up a policy on government wages.

Downsizing needed?

It is often argued that periodic pay revisions would be alright if only the government could bring itself to downsize its workforce — by at least 10 to 15 per cent. From 2013 to 2016, the Central government workforce (excluding defence forces) is estimated to grow from 33.1 lakh to 35.5 lakh. Of the increase of 2.4 lakh, the police alone would account for an increase of 1.2 lakh or 50 per cent. What is required is not so much downsizing as right-sizing — we need more doctors, engineers and teachers.

Downsizing of a sort has happened. The Sixth Pay Commission estimated that the share of pay, allowances and pension of the Central government in revenue receipts came down from 38 per cent in 1998-99 to an average of 24 per cent in 2005-07. Based on the budget figures for 2015-16, this share appears to have declined further to 21 per cent. In financial terms, this amounts to a reduction of 17 percentage points over 17 years or an annual downsizing of 1 per cent. It’s a different matter that it is not downsizing through reduction in numbers of personnel.

It is often said that pay increases in government must be linked to productivity. We are told that this is where government and the private sector differ hugely. However, the notion that private sector pay is always linked to productivity is a myth. In his best-selling book, Capital in the 21st Century, economist Thomas Piketty argues that the explosion in CEO pay in the West has been increasingly divorced from performance. He also argues that the emergence of highly paid “supermanagers” is an important factor driving inequality in the West.

We are seeing a similar phenomenon in the private sector in India. The serious public policy challenge, therefore, is not so much to contain a rise in pay in the public sector as finding ways to rein in pay in the private sector. It is also ironical that people should harp on linking pay to performance in the public sector when high-profile firms in the private sector such as Google and Accenture are turning away from such measurement.

A better idea would be to conduct periodic management audits of government departments on parameters such as cost effectiveness, timeliness and customer satisfaction.

Improving service delivery in government is the key issue. Periodic pay revision and higher pay at lower levels of government relative to the private sector could help this cause provided these are accompanied by other initiatives. The macroeconomic impact is nowhere as severe as it is made out to be.

INS Trikand to Participate in Exercise ‘Konkan 2015’

INS Trikand to Participate in Exercise ‘Konkan 2015’

The Indian Navy (IN) and the Royal Navy (RN) have an unparalleled history of interactions due to our shared heritage. Recent operational interactions between the IN and the RN started in 2004 with the institutionalisation of Exercise KONKAN, named after the Western coastal region of India. Since then, the two navies have been meeting regularly at sea and the exercise has grown in complexity, scale and intensity after more than a decade of exercising together. These exercises, hosted in rotation by both the Navies, also provide opportunities for professional and cultural interaction between personnel. The bonds developed through such events further strengthen the established mechanisms of maritime cooperation between the two navies, while pursuing common goals of keeping the seas around us safe and secure.

Both the Navies share many common concerns such as protection of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), threats to maritime trade and commerce from piracy, illegal immigration and maritime terrorism. Maritime interactions under the aegis of KONKAN series of exercises have promoted synergy and inter-operability between the two Navies. The exercise also provides valuable opportunity to practice a wide range of maritime operations in realistic conditions.

KONKAN aims to promote mutual understanding and provide exposure to each others’ operating procedures, communication procedures and best practices. This allows the Navies to develop greater confidence to operate together, if required, during complex maritime missions. Periodic conduct of this exercise has helped to build on past experiences and further advance professional as well as operational engagements between the two navies. Such engagements between the two navies symbolize the growing friendship of two major powers in the world, with an aim to maintain peace and stability especially in the Indian Ocean Region.

This year, the IN will be represented in the exercise by a guided missile frigate, INS Trikand with integral helicopter and a team of marine commandos. The RN would be represented by HMS Iron Duke, an auxiliary vessel, a nuclear submarine and other shore based assets.

KONKAN 2015, the 10th edition in KONKAN series, will be conducted from 05 - 11 Sep 15, in two phases. The harbour phase at Devonport will involve professional exchanges, exercise planning conferences, sporting fixtures and socio-cultural events. The elaborate sea phase to be held off the South Coast of UK, will involve surface, sub-surface and air exercises of varying complexities. Explosive Ordinance Teams of both navies will also participate in the exercise.

The benefits of our operational interaction are clearly visible as both the Navies today have an improved and steadfast understanding. KONKAN 15 will further enhance our capability to work together at sea in complex situations and also contribute towards maritime security in the global commons

Achieving Digital India

How can the government’s vision of a Digital India be achieved? This column provides a possible set of priorities and an implicit action plan.

The obvious foundation of Digital India is the requisite infrastructure, but the government’s conception of infrastructure is somewhat lopsided—too broad in some aspects, while not emphasising others enough. The first step has to be to create a robust and extensive fibre optic network, and to make more spectrum available for wireless connectivity. The latter, in particular, with the use of smartphones and smaller tablets, will make expensive projects such as Common Service Centres almost unnecessary. Privately-run kiosks, or desktop computers in post offices, might be an adequate supplement to personal access devices (which can also be shared).

A nationwide digital network will require robust software, especially for security. The continued instances of security breaches in developed countries with supposedly advanced digital infrastructure reinforce the view that security is a paramount concern for a potential new digital infrastructure. But cyber-security seems to be peripheral in the conceptualisation of infrastructure. The role of digital infrastructure in supporting Indian business firms also needs attention.

After digital infrastructure, the second priority has to be training. Developing and installing software for a national digital infrastructure can be done with relatively little labour, but maintenance, repair and technical support for the hardware and software of digital infrastructure are skills which are already in short supply, even without extensive coverage. It is not clear that the government’s vision fully realises this need, even within the “pillar” of “IT for jobs”, but implementing Digital India will require both public and private effort for this dimension of skilling.

A related aspect of training is imparting skills in using various kinds of application software, including more generic examples such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, but also more specialised software for accounting, website design, graphic design and more. The government’s own documents speak of skilling in the context of the IT or ITeS, but they do not seem to realise the potential scope of IT for all aspects of the economy: Even a cloth merchant can use accounting software. When one thinks about applications in particular, the issue of language becomes central. The need for availability of software in multiple Indian languages does not seem to be recognised in the government’s vision of Digital India.

Educational content also needs to be available in major Indian languages. Health applications, information for farmers and financial services, to be truly accessible to the masses, ought to have local language versions. One can think of this as an aspect of infrastructure, something that does not matter for a country like the US, but is taken for granted across Europe, where each country uses its own language.

The final aspect of implementing a vision of Digital India should be digitising the internal workings of government, not just at the national and state levels, but all the way down to local governments. This is obviously a huge undertaking, when even basic aspects of operations such as accrual accounting are absent from sub-national tiers of government. It is not clear that the existing vision acknowledges the enormity of the implementation task, blithely listing a wide range of government services to be provided by digital means. As in the case of cyber-security, the experience of developed countries is a reminder of the potential difficulties of building IT systems.

If Digital India is to be achieved, there needs to be a clear prioritisation of goals. The most fundamental goal should be to create a robust and secure infrastructure. The second priority is to make sure that there is enough expertise to maintain this infrastructure. Third, basic software applications and educational content should be made available in multiple Indian languages. These three goals are not specific to the workings of government. The fourth implementation goal should be to digitise the internal operations of government at all levels. This task alone is an enormous one, even before citizen-facing IT-enabled government services can be provided.

Many of the specific activities and services listed in Digital India documents are miscellaneous in nature, and of secondary importance. They illustrate the laundry-list approach to government, which spreads attention and effort in ways that can prevent almost anything specific or substantial being accomplished. For example, progress on the national fibre optic network has been pitifully slow. The entire Digital India vision as publicised is very government-centric, rather than focusing on the wider potential importance of IT in India’s economy. A truly Digital India will need to be developed in a manner that is quite different from what is implicit in the government’s current vision. It is not too late to rethink the vision and create a sensible action plan for implementation.
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IAS2015GSPRE by samveg ias dehradun

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No export of democracy

Democracies celebrate Magna Carta, not war victory. Such actions only encourage Bonaparteism and, in no way, strengthen the people's say. I was dismayed to see a full-page advertisement in newspapers to commemorate the victory in the 1965 war against Pakistan. The advertisement said: "The Indo-Pak War of 1965, which began on August 5 and ended on September 23, is one of the biggest tank battles since World War II. Pakistan launched troops inside Kashmir under Operation Gibraltar in early August 1965.

"Further operations were stalled when Indian Army captured the strategic Haji Pir Pass on August 28, 1965. Pakistan then launched operation Grand Slam in Akhnoor sector, but India opened the Western Front to counter the same. Pakistan's 1 Armoured Division was badly mauled in the Battle of Asal Uttar with nearly 100 tanks destroyed. Other major battles were fought at Poonch, Phillora, Barki and Dograi."

True, India had an upper hand but it was at best 55 per cent against 45 per cent. Lahore was the yardstick. We could not take it and had to bypass it. General J N Chaudhuri, who was the Chief of Army Staff at that time, told me subsequently in an interview that he had never planned to occupy Lahore. It would have unnecessarily pinned down a large number of troops and we would have suffered heavy casualties. Pakistan, he said, would have defended the city with all it resources and fought us in every house, every street.

This may well be a valid explanation. Yet, the general impression is that India failed to take Lahore. A small contingent which reached the Ravi Bridge, bypassing Lahore, was severely crushed. General Chaudhuri's defence was that the march to the Ravi Bridge was neither authorised, nor did it figure in his scheme of things. This must be true. But the thinking of an average person is different. He believed that India lacked strength to occupy Lahore.

General Chaudhuri said that their main purpose was to destroy Pakistan's armour, particularly the Patton tank which America had given them. The Ichhogil Canal in the area came in handy. Indian troops breached it to let the water spread. The tanks got stuck in the water. The question which remains unanswered is: Who was responsible for the 1965 war? General Mohammad Ayub Khan, who was then Pakistan's Marshal Law Administrator, and Commander-in-Chief told me that it was 'Bhutto's war'. Bhutto sent infiltrators into Kashmir, without talking him into confidence. In fact, General Ayub's son, Gohar Ayub, apart from confirming about what his father had said, went public with part of the information.

Gohar used to live in a palatial house in the suburbs of Islamabad. This was where he hosted a lunch for me. Mushahid Husain, then the editor of 'Muslim', had arranged it. I remember the day distinctly because I heard about the assassination of Indira Gandhi at Gohar's house. He spoke about her only for a while and that too cursorily. In fact, Gohar was keen to tell me something which was not complimentary to our armed forces. His story was that our armour had chinks. I was sure it had. But I was taken aback when he said that a copy of topmost secret papers from India's military headquarters would be "with us before they reached Nehru's table".

Those days you could walk through South Block corridors from one end to the other in New Delhi. Security requirements had not yet blocked the passage. Nor had gates been built within gates. How could a paper conceivably reach Pakistan intelligence agencies before a messenger covered a few yards to deliver it at Nehru's office?

At that time Gohar did not give the example of an Indian brigadier parting with the 1965 war plan for a sum of Rs 20,000. However, he did remark that his father was "contemptuous of Indian officers selling their country for a few thousand rupees". I did not join issue with him because it was the first time I was hearing of any such thing. But I told Gohar about a remark his father had made against the Kashmiris when I met him in Islamabad in 1972. I had gone there to interview Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was briefly the president after Pakistan's debacle at Dhaka.

'Bhutto's mujahideen'

Ayub said Bhutto had assured him that the Kashmiris would rise in revolt once they knew the Pakistan army was in their midst. Ayub referred to the infiltrators as 'Bhutto's mujahideen'. According to Ayub, he told Bhutto that if he knew anything about Kashmiris, they would never raise the gun.

Gohar was wrong in saying that the reports on Kashmir reaching his father were 'doctored'. His father had himself told me that Bhutto never took him into confidence on the scale of infiltration. (Ironically, that's exactly what Nawaz Sharif, in exile at Jeddah, told me about Pakistan's misadventure at Kargil). Pakistan's attack in '65 began with hundreds of infiltrators - mujahids (liberators), as Bhutto, then Pakistan's foreign minister, hailed them - stealing into Kashmir.

The report of the intrusion first appeared in the Indian press on August 9, 1965, along with Ayub's assurance to Kewal Singh, while accepting his credentials as India's high commissioner at Rawalpindi, that Pakistan would reciprocate every move from India for better cooperation. He argued that infiltration into Kashmir was not the same thing as infiltration into India. The 'uprising' that Pakistan expected to foment failed because local Kashmiris did not help the infiltrators. And when I interviewed Bhutto, he did not deny Ayub's allegation that the 1965 war was his doing. However, he said that he has "learnt a lesson and wouldn't repeat it."

If at all New Delhi was keen to talk about the 1965 war victory, however limited, it should have dwelt more into the benefits of being a democratic state instead of violence and weapons. India's advantage is that sovereignty remains with the people. In Pakistan, the interest of the armed forces comes first. New Delhi cannot export democracy, but it should help Pakistan get back the rule where the people have the final say.

Rank & Pension

The nation is presently in the grip of OROP (One Rank One Pension) fever. Several army veterans are fasting unto death; passions are ignited while invectives fly thick and fast. Emotion is being invoked much more than logic and facts, often misleading the people. Ex-Servicemen complain of inadequate pension due to truncated service and limited job opportunities after compulsory early retirement. No one doubts the truth of any of these grievances, but the issue is more deep-seated. The conjecture on the impact of OROP varies from the extremely conservative to the wildly fanciful, while skirting the precise nature and magnitude of the problem.

OROP implies uniform pension to persons retiring in the same rank with the same length of service irrespective of their dates of retirement. It implies bridging the gap between the rates of pension of current and past pensioners, and also their equalisation in respect of future enhancements in the rates of pension. One should dispel the myth that OROP is an army-specific problem. All paramilitary forces and 99 per cent of the civilian government employees are victims of an unjust system of pension. Barring a handful that has the privilege of retiring at a fixed scale, normally at the top, whether in the army or in the civil administration, all employees suffer from this discrimination.

Pension drawn by any government servant including defence personnel consists of two elements: a basic pension which is fixed at the time of retirement and a relief thereon as and when successive DA instalments are released by the Government based on the consumer price index and the rate of inflation. Central Pay Commissions (CPC) are constituted every 10 years. With every CPC award, enhancement in pay-scales and revised rates of pension are automatically passed on to the past pensioners whose basic salaries at the time of retirement are revised and re-fixed in the new scale of pay and new pension determined accordingly. While some benefits of revision are passed on to retired employees, the problem arises due to the bunching of several old pay-scales into a smaller number of scales in the new pay structure. There would be no disparity in pension if the number of pay-scales and their intermediate stages remained the same. This was the case with the pay-scales of defence forces, which were different from those of civil servants, till the Second Central Pay Commission (CPC) awards (1966-76).

The armed forces enjoyed the OROP till 1976, i.e. before the third CPC (1976-86) took an ex parte decision against the scheme and applied the civilian pension rules to the armed forces pensioners as well. This was the genesis of discrimination between the past and present pensioners. The Third CPC compressed 36 running pay-scales prevalent in government service to only 19 by merging several previous scales into single running scales in the revised pay structure. When a number of pay-scales are merged into a single running pay band, pensions drawn by all “pre-existing pensioners”, who had retired at the old scales, are fixed at the lowest of the pay band into which these old scales are merged. This is where the problem arises and disparity kicks in between the past and the present pensioners. An officer who is scheduled to retire shortly will obviously draw a higher pay than the same-rank official who had retired 10 years ago.

With the Fourth and Fifth CPC awards, the number of pay-scales again proliferated to 34, but the problem was really aggravated when the 6th CPC (2006-16) reduced it drastically to only nine running pay-bands (PB) by introducing a number of fixed grade-pays within each band; these grade pays did not affect the pension. For example, 26 pay-scales were converted into four PBs, accommodating within a single pay-band (PB-4) a scale of Rs 37,400 - Rs 67,000 of all officers from the level of Lt. Colonel to Major General, making all of them, irrespective of their years of retirement or rank, draw the same basic pension of Rs 18,700 fixed at the lowest of PB-4, and hence less than anyone retiring presently at a higher level within this PB with higher or lower rank. This anomaly also applies to the civilian employees. All past retirees would therefore stand to suffer monetary losses which will amplify with every successive CPC awards, with ever-widening disparity between present and past pensioners.

The resentment of defence forces on the ground of unequal pension is thus understandable, but there is another reason for their sensitivity to this. For armed forces, equality in service has two components, rank and length of service. Rank signifies command, control and responsibility. A soldier is attached to his rank and is allowed to retain it even after retirement. Differential pensions to soldiers retiring in the same rank with equal years of service also create social inequality between them, apart from financial inequality. Nearly 85 per cent of the armed forces personnel retire below the age of 40; this is necessary to keep our fighting forces young. Even officers retire between 52 and 54 depending on their rank, while all civilian employees retire at the age of 60. A larger service-span allows the civilians more time to rise in the hierarchy and receive higher pension. Such advantages are denied to the armed forces. Though jobs are reserved for ex-servicemen, opportunities are limited. Given the hardships and peculiarities of service conditions of the armed forces, they obviously cannot be equated with civil servants.

For the armed forces personnel, OROP is imperative. Which is why all political parties and five Prime Ministers have been in favour of it, but the demand still remains unaddressed, due primarily to bureaucratic apathy if not disinclination. Bureaucrats, who have to decide on such matters, do not stand to lose; almost every bureaucrat reaches the fixed apex scale of Rs 80,000 at which there is cent per cent equalisation of pension, whereas only the army commanders and the Vice-Chiefs of defence forces draw the apex scale. The fact that multiplicities of committees have had to address the issue is in itself a testimony to the inherent difficulties.

On the government’s side, the major impediment is, of course, financial. In 2011, the Controller General of Defence Accounts had estimated the additional annual liability on this account at Rs 3000 crore. Today it is estimated to be about Rs 8300 crore annually which may increase to Rs 10000 crore, if the impending Seventh CPC awards are factored in, taking the base year of 2011 for fixing pension, and rolling it out from January 2015. Both points have been contested by army veterans, who want a continuous ‘rolling’ adjustment of all past pensions with present values which is unrealistic. Given that 60,000 soldiers retire every year, it will be an administrative nightmare to adjust the pensions of some 30 lakh existing defence pensioners on a running basis. Instead, the government’s proposal of adjustment once every five years in place of once in every ten years for civilians appears reasonable. The financial implication is probably being exaggerated by bureaucrats and ministry mandarins.

The Central government’s total pension expenditure during 2012-13 was Rs 69,479 crore, of which defence pension was Rs 43,368 crore and civil pension Rs 26,111 crore. Both have increased almost equally during the last five years. Factoring in the likely impact of the Seventh CPC, the total pension liability may increase to Rs 88,000 crore. Compare this with the Union Government’s subsidy expenditure of Rs 257,179 crore in 2012-13, of which food subsidy was Rs 85,000 crore, fertiliser subsidy Rs 65,808 crore and petroleum subsidy Rs 96,880 crore. Given the falling price of petroleum in the global market, there is some cushion to absorb the excess expenditure of Rs 18,000 crore that OROP is likely to impose, provided the Government curtails subsidy, disinvests its PSUs and implements economic reforms with urgency. If the fiscal deficit of Rs 4.95 lakh crore in 2012-13 did not throw the economy out of gear; the additional burden imposed by OROP will not unsettle it either. The nation should not be seen haggling with veterans who have sacrificed their lives to secure our borders.
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