The report by the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council showing Meghalaya to be among states with shortest working hours comes as no surprise. People in government offices even today don’t turn up before 11 am especially in areas beyond the state capital where monitoring is almost absent. Add to that the absenteeism for various reasons such as attending funerals and other responsibilities particularly of women employees and productivity is at its lowest ebb. While senior officers particularly those from the IAS work beyond the scheduled hours to meet deadlines, their ability to keep track of employees working under them and to enforce discipline and punctuality has always been lax. It is to make up for this staff lethargy that the Government of Meghalaya has had to appoint several contractual employees from whom they extract work. Measuring how much work each government employee turns in at the end of the day is a fair practice and taking note of poor performance and needless delays in addressing public grievances is an imperative in Meghalaya.
For far too long the lackadaisical attitude of staff has been tolerated. Perhaps ministerial staff have to be on their toes because the ministers have to often work overtime. But others down the line especially at the Block level leave much to be desired. Block level staff are supposed to take government schemes to the last mile and to explain to farmers and other stakeholders how they can access the schemes and what documents are needed to benefit from those schemes. The fact that Meghalaya still has a large section of population who refuse to enrol for the Aadhar card and some even refuse to register themselves as voters on account of some beliefs preached by overzealous Christian denominations clearly indicates that the government system has not been able to penetrate deep enough and to break through that veil of disinformation.
Time has come for the Government of Meghalaya to put in place a system of measuring efficiency from their employees. After all, there is such a thing as value for money. Spending taxpayers’ money on non-productive staff is what has impeded development in this state. People in distant villages face several barriers when they visit government offices. Most often they are treated like underdogs waiting for a favour instead of the public with the right to demand service from public servants. This is due to peoples’ lack of awareness about their rights and government employees believe in the adage ‘the less people know the better it is for them. The reason why government jobs are so valued is because of the easy-going nature of the work and the lack of a monitoring system. While private institutions have a key-in system for the time of entry and exit of employees there is no such system in government service. Unless such strict measures are adopted the Chief Minister’s promise of the 10 billion dollar economy will remain a pipe dream.
