One Employee Per 100 People: Haryana’s Reduced State Capacity Is A Matter Of Concern

The state capacity is not keeping up pace with the times in Haryana. In fact, an analysis of government employment by Dainik Bhaskar shows that it has drastically fallen in the past three decades. Not only total government employees per 100 people have come down but also the total strength itself has reduced.

In 1991, there were 4 lakh employees in the Haryana government while the state’s population at the time was around 1.25 crore. This translated to about one government worker per 31 people or just more than three government workers per 100 population. Today, Haryana’s population has grown to 2.9 crore while employees on state’s payroll have come down to only 2.85 lakh, the Bhaskar report says. That means the government has only one employee per 100 people population on average.

If the state had to maintain even the 1991 ratio, it should’ve had 9.2 lakh workers on its payroll today, more than three times the existing strength. When we consider the immense expansion of state’s workload and responsibilities in the past three decades, the numbers appear that much worse.

In education department, around 24,000 posts of teachers lie vacant. In the past one year alone, the teacher pupil ratio has worsened as around three lakh more students in the state have been admitted in government schools than the previous year (perhaps shifting from private schools due to financial problems of parents thanks to Covid-19). In 2020, there was one teacher per 23 students. This year, it’s one teacher per 26 students simply by the virtue of lack of new appointments.

Similar situation prevails in the police department as well where about 18,000 posts are lying vacant with most of the vacancies at the lower level (almost 12,000 posts that are vacant are of constables). There is one cop per 554 people when the recommended figure as per the United Nations is one policeman per 450 people.

The situation is even more grave in the health department where there is one doctor per 10,000 people when one considers only those employed by the government. If we take the private sector’s participation, then the figure improves drastically to a doctor per 1700 people though it’s still lower than the recommended figure of one doctor per 1,000 people.

It’s pertinent to note that Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar filled more than 60,000 vacancies which was more than the combined figurer of two terms of his predecessor Bhupinder Singh Hooda and one term of Om Prakash Chautala.

Khattar made filling government jobs with transparency his chief USP in the first term, however, almost every exam in the second term has been marred with paper leaks thereby squandering away one of the biggest legacies and reforms in such a short span.