Uneven Salaries (December 17)

Manipur retires early, gets up early, but begins work extremely late. The last is especially true of the government job sector. Come to think of it, the number of actual work hours a day must be far less than the official figure. In some offices, it cannot be much more than a small fraction of what they are supposed to be on paper. Even in the few hours of actual work, everything moves at snail's pace. 

Lessons contained in nursery rhymes that teach the wisdom of doing tomorrow's work today, are not at all reflected in the work culture of the state. Of course, we again mean the work culture prevalent in the government environment. Otherwise, for those in the state's fledgling private sector as well as tradional professions, whose livelihoods depend on the amount as well as quality of work they put into the profession they are in, the scenario is quite different. 

As for instance, amongst the farmers, the urgency of work during the cultivation season is encapsulated in the saying amongst them that even if your mother dies, the funeral can wait but not the crops. This is against the background of the tradition amongst the Meiteis that a dead body is to be cremated at the earliest possible. By the same pressure of earning a livelihood, women fish vendors from Moirang, land in Imphal at daybreak along with their head loads, even in punishing winter chills. It is such a pity that these and many others who toil thus but their earnings remain meager while many in government offices who do much less work a day earn salaries that are multiples of what the former get.

Why just the vendors and farmers, it is also employees in the organized sections of the private sector who have been unfairly outweighed on the salary scale by their government counterparts. As a matter of fact, there is much truth in the argument that it is this lop-sidedness that has stunted private enterprises as much as it has slowly strangulated many traditional professions, which in actuality reflect much more faithfully the real health of the state's economy. 

No farmer's son wants to inherit his father's profession anymore and would mortgage or sell even his land to pay the bribe necessary to get him a government job. Similarly, in most cases, it is only those who have not made it to a government job who resign to non-government professions. 

We wish the government salary structuring in the state had been more considerate to the non-government employment sector, and even if it is not to all extent, some parity had been maintained so that the private professions are not dwarfed to the extent they have been. This could have been done by making government salaries reflect the health of the state's economy at least to some extent, just as the private sector jobs necessarily do. 

This, not so much out of any charity, but to monitor a balanced growth of the state economy. It is everybody's knowledge that the government job market is super saturated now although the number of employable young men and women are on a constant rise. In such a circumstance, nobody needs to be told that the key to the solution to the problem of unemployment in the state lies in invigorating the largely untapped private sector employment market. In seeking this end, policies that midget private jobs will not help matters one bit.

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