Our salt czar
The curious case of the salt commissioners is an excellent example of the sort of meaningless sinecures that have been established in babudom
India has a salt commissioner based in Jaipur. He is our NaCl czar. There are four deputy salt commissioners in regional offices. All these worthies are members of the Indian Salt Service. The salt commissioners apparently do not collect enough cess to even cover the salary bill of the organization.
These Kafkaesque facts are from a post about the irony of taxing salt in Gandhi’s country by Beena Aiyar in the Spontaneous Order blog of the Centre for Civil Society, a think tank in New Delhi. Narendra Modi was swept to power on the promise that he will improve governance while streamlining government. Not much has been done about the latter as yet. The curious case of the salt commissioners is an excellent example of the sort of meaningless sinecures that have been established in babudom.
India needs more judges, policemen, school teachers and primary health workers if the state is to build capacity for the coming decades. It instead has irrelevant but overstaffed departments that need to be dismantled soon.
Read the complete story on live mint website.