The Hindu Business Line : SCOPE moots autonomy to PSE boards on salaries

New Delhi, Aug 7 The Second Pay Revision Committee for public sector enterprises (PSEs) set up by the Government is likely to examine a proposal to give autonomy to the PSE boards on deciding salary levels of new employees.

According to the Standing Conference on Public Enterprises (SCOPE), this has become necessary because the PSEs have been unable to attract the best students in the country for several years now.

Simultaneously, attrition levels in the core and critical areas are very high.

Data available with SCOPE shows that no student from the country’s premier technical and management institutions like IITs and IIMs has joined the public sector since 2003-04.

“SCOPE has made its suggestion to the committee and their recommendations are likely to be finalised by early 2008,” said Dr S.M. Deewan, Director-General of SCOPE.

The SCOPE proposal is to empower the PSE boards to decide employee remunerations.

According to the proposal, since the Government has already placed its trust in these board of directors for managing thousands of crores of assets and handling thousands of crores worth of business, there can be a provision to give them the power to set up board-level remuneration committees that would decide compensation packages for persons at different levels.

Although the PSEs participate in campus recruitment, they are unable to compete with the offers made by private companies to students from premier institutions.

“As a result, no student passing out of the seven IITs or the six IIMs have joined PSUs in the past several years. Government enterprises are hiring only from second- and third-rank institutions,” Dr Dewan said.

Also, students passing out of the Indian Business School (IBS) in Hyderabad or the National Law School in Bangalore have preferred to stay away from PSU jobs.