PSUs Malaise
Leader writer: Jagjit T.
The red and yellow buses of the Manipur State Road Transport Corporation, MSRTC, or the Manipur State Transport, as it was once known, was once upon a time ubiquitous upon the roads of the state. The MST did yeoman's service in its heyday. Its vehicles pioneered transport services on many a line, and plied on routes that no private transporter would have dared undertake because they were not commercially viable. They also performed a variety of roles, serving as school buses, and ferrying essential commodities into the state from Dimapur and elsewhere.
Today, the corporation's proud fleet of over a hundred vehicles has been reduced to a few skeletons lying around the MSRTC head office at Moirangkhom, the considerable real estate owned by it are in danger of ending up on the auction block, and its employees have to wait years, rather than months to see their salaries paid, that too only after periodically going on strike. The only service still being offered by the MSRTC is the railway reservation booking facility at its head office.
The MSRTC's story is distressingly typical of nearly every single public sector unit or government undertaking under the government of Manipur. The Manipur Cycles Corporation, Manipur Agro-Industries Corporation, Manipur Plantation Crops Ltd, Manipur Spinning Mills Ltd, the Khansari sugar mill, the cement factory at Hundung - some of these once upon a time may have managed to turn a profit, while others never even got a chance to get off the ground, but all of these are without exception dead or dying. Even the Manipur Electronics Corporation Ltd, MANITRON, whose assembled TV sets were quite popular a few years ago, is floundering.
The employees of these units must be the most unfortunate of all state government employees. While others may not get their salaries for a couple of months, these would be lucky to get one month's pay in a year and while some, such as the employees of the MSRTC and MANITRON may still have enough to make a ruckus and force concessions from the government, others are numerically too weak to make their voices heard.
The reasons for the failure of the state's PSUs are not far to seek. Beset as nearly every one of these were by chronic overstaffing, poor and unimaginative management, lack of capital, the indifferent attitude of a government that was unable to decide whether these were commercial enterprises, public services or experiments in employment generation, supply and marketing bottlenecks, and most crucial of all, the lack of any productive work culture among their employees, these units were almost certainly doomed from the start.
Reviving them is not an entirely impossible task, but it may well be asked whether it would be worth the trouble. The task requires injection of huge amounts of fresh funds, the induction of a professional management cadre, and the inculcation of work discipline and a competitive work culture among the employees, all of which are in short supply at the moment. There is no guarantee, moreover, that these units might not revert back to being millstones around the government's neck.
Under the circumstances, therefore, the proposal reportedly doing the rounds in government circles for privatizing these PSUs may be the best option available. That said, it must also be emphasized that the human cost of taking such a step must be carefully considered. In particular, the interests of the employees of such units will have to be protected. A fair and even handed policy that causes the least hurt, would have to be put in place to tackle the questions of retrenchment, retraining, or absorption of these employees in other departments before the hard decisions regarding privatization can be taken.
(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press) |
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