The 2nd PSU Pay Commission Report

So finally the 2nd pay commission report for PSU employees is out. Though much awaited for a long time, the report drew little fanfare and publicity. There was very small or no coverage by the leading dailies of the country. As far as I remember one small report was published in Business Standard and that's all.

Anyway after that some amount of research has been done and some interesting and informative articles and blogs have been published on this topic. But I am astounded to see that there's almost no article which clearly focuses on the main problem the public sector unit employees are facing.

While there is no doubt that an immediate pay hike is necessary to bring the PSU employees' salaries at par with their peers at private sector, one cannot deny the pressing demand to overhaul the whole pay-structure extant at these PSU units. At present annual increment for a particular employee has nothing to do with his performance or potential. That is, in the present structure one employee will continue to get annual increments (a fixed percentage of your basic, irrespective of your performance or position). Similarly for promotions, you need a minimum 3 years to get promoted to the next level even when your performance demands that you be given a promotion in every alternative year. Moreover, boot-licking and nepotism has been shamelessly showing its ugly face every now and then.

While working with one of the downstream oil PSU the one thing I got convinced of about the PSUs in general and this company in particular is that this place is never meant for a qualified graduate engineer. The whole structure of the organisation is such that the qualified engineer will continue to feel like and alien here while the operators/staffs and promotee officers will feel like they are in some paradise. In fact paradise is an understatement. The pay structure and facilities are designed in view of these people.

We hear that in the new pay revision report the M J Rao committee has evinced the need of segregating PSU companies according to their turn-over and overall financial condition, but clearly they have turned a blind eye to this ludicrous pay structure. If the PSUs want to compete with their peers in the private sector and want to retain their talent pool, something must be done immediately to reshuffle the pay-structure and change the HR policies so that the young and talented young employees don't feel unwanted.