That civil servants are not liked by most people is a known fact. The reasons for rating the government servants poorly are understandable. Inefficiency and love for graft are two major factors that have alienated the civil servants from most people. Yet the government cannot function without civil servants or bureaucracy.
People in general have a strong feeling that the government servants are being unduly pampered in recent years with taxpayers' money. First, the government almost doubled their salaries and allowances in 2015 under a new pay scale and allowed the officials enjoying the rank and status of a joint secretary to take interest-free car loans and receive Tk 40,000 as vehicle maintenance allowance per month. Recently, the amount of car loan has been enhanced along with maintenance allowance to Tk 50,000.
More sops are apparently awaiting the civil servants. A move is on to hike substantially the size of home loans for them by taking recourse to a different source of financing. Government servants are now allowed to receive a maximum amount of Tk 120,000 as home loan from the state coffer. The amount, these days, is too meagre even to build a one-room house. So, there was a logical demand for increasing the loan limit. In response, the government had formed a committee comprising government officials to examine the issue and recommend necessary steps.
The committee has recently come out with suggestions that, if implemented, it would make way for creating a huge recurrent fiscal burden on the government. And the issue, obviously, would be settled with taxpayers' money.
The committee, according to a report published in this paper last Thursday, has suggested arranging home loans from banks or financial institutions at 8.5 per cent rate of interest and fixing the maximum loan limit at Tk 7.5 million. The committee also recommended for realising interest from the borrowers at 5.0 per cent and paying the rest 3.5 per cent to the banks from the state coffer as subsidy.
According to an estimate, the government will have to spend around Tk 9.0 billion annually as interest-subsidy if loans are made available to 70,000 out of total 1.15 million civil servants.
If the recommendations on home loans are adopted, banks, for the first time will have a role in financing loans for government servants. But subsidy for meeting interest payments against the loans would be huge. As the banks are now in the midst of hiking their lending rates, the home loans are likely to be more expensive than what the officials committee now estimates. In that case, the subsidy volume would be even higher.
The government would be facing criticism from different quarters if it really decides to spend a huge amount on account of subsidy payment against home loans for civil servants. Why should the government offer such a facility to a tiny section of society when it cannot implement many important projects or support safety net programmes for the poor for shortage of resources? The move will be regarded as discriminatory.
As observed in most professions in recent times, the quality of bureaucracy has also deteriorated. Yet the bureaucrats are becoming increasingly powerful and managing perks and privileges, in many cases, more than what they deserve. The main reason behind their becoming unusually influential is not that difficult to trace. A section of their political masters, possibly, is aware of it.