Clearly, the committee is either out of touch with reality or it has not even deigned to consider that public sector salaries should be linked to the state of the economy. Even a cursory look at what is happening in the corporate canvas should have been enough to bring home to the committee the elementary fact that this is the wrong time to start paying higher salaries.

In the private sector, redundancies and salary freezes are the order of the day, and few private sector executives can be sure of their next increments. Yet the committee clearly considers the public sector to be above such mundane considerations of profitability.

At least in the public sector, jobs are secure and manyemployees in the private sector would willingly take a salary cut for such security. Add to that security the fact that dearness allowance protects the public sector employee's pay-packet, unlike in the private sector where several executives have no DA at all, and the need for higher pay for PSU executives assumes very low priority.

It is a fact that the best and brightest among public sector executives are often lured away by the private sector, and they get salaries several times what they earned earlier. There is definitely a case for increasing public sector salaries for some people. But there is no case for increasing salaries across the board.

The trouble with the public sector is twofold -- one, everybody feels entitled to the same increments, which means the rewards for merit are often peanuts; and two, the inefficient are not fired.

Policy should be aimed, not at securing some abstract consideration of a just pay packet, but at removing the differences that exist between conditions in theprivate and public sectors. Towards that end, not only should pay be linked to performance, but all non-unionised executives should be on contract, so that non-performance can also be penalised, and the management has flexibility in cutting costs during times of recession.

Lateral entry at all levels should be the ideal to aim for. Ultimately, employee compensation will have to be linked to the ability of the PSU to pay -- asking sick PSUs to pay the higher scales, even after a restructuring programme is drawn up, is to condemn them to sickness for all time.