by
Dr. Abdus Samad
At long last, the wastefulness and the inefficiency of public sector is widely recognized. Privatization is underway and the government is almost committed to not involving itself in the direct production of goods. Thus considerable progress has been made in the direction of eliminating waste and inefficiency.
However, there is still some work to be done. Unfortunately, little attention has been devoted to the elimination of all government waste and inefficiency. We should take the opportunity to study all public sector corporations in order to identify those that are wasteful and inefficient. Perhaps some can be privatized. But certainly not all. In which case, will the bold decision to close down these institutions be taken or not?
One area where probably fat is more visible than on a sumo wrestler is that of the so called Government institutes for research and cultural and literary activities and in other educational establishments. Unfortunately, detailed data on these institutions is not available to allow anyone to see how much of our taxes these institutions consume and what they produce. However, a rough picture can be obtained from crude estimates and it suggests considerable waste.
There are at least 150 academic research institutions in the country. At an average cost of about a crore rupees a year, these institutes cost us a about Rs. 150 crore a year. Then there are at least 8 cultural and literary organizations. Computing at the same average cost as the research institutes, these cultural organizations are spending about Rs. 8 crore.
What are these organizations producing? By all accounts, academics is not an area that we have taken seriously in the past. The result is that we have very few Pakistani academics. Of the few that we have a large fraction reside abroad. Consequently, the chances are that there are not enough serious scholars in any one discipline in the country to develop a critical mass for a research institution in that discipline. Yet in each area we have a number of institutions. We have 10 institutes in economics, 3 in rural or agricultural related areas, about 6 in international relations, regional studies and strategic studies. The list goes on and on.
There are also over 20 universities in the country and each of these universities has a department for each of the areas that there is a research institute for. The budgets of these universities are huge and the quality of their output, namely their students, is extremely poor. But that is another story.
To illustrate my point, I will study the example of social sciences, an area that I know something about. As mentioned above, there are about 15 research institutes in the social sciences. There are two new institutes that are coming up in economics and related areas. In addition to these, there are about 20 universities. Universities In the US tell me that in order to have a reasonable department in any subject, they need a minimum of about 20 senior faculty members who are actively publishing. Research institutes in the US indicate that for them the number is about the same if not more. Let us assume that the research institutes that are set up for research in social sciences which incidentally comprise of a number of subjects, require only 10 specialists, half that of what the specialized institutes require. We can now determine the total demand for high quality social scientists by these academic institutions. As definition of high quality let us take some form of research and publishing in respected and reasonable journals overseas.
In order to staff these 20 universities and the 15 research institutes in the social sciences adequately, at least 550 of these high quality, academic social scientists would be required in each of these social science departments. By highly qualified, we would mean those who have been publishing in the area. Thus taking social sciences to include economics, sociology, politics and Anthropology, we would need about 2200 such people to man our universities and research institutes.
Armed with this demand figure, I went to the library and looked up journals to see the availability of Pakistani academic social scientists. In the last 5 years, I found only 20 Pakistan names in academic journals. Of these eight, 15 lived overseas and none were in our academic institutions. The conclusion is immediately obvious: all our academic institutions-- our departments in the social sciences economics at universities and our research institutes-- have no academic social scientists.
The output of these institutions tends to be very self-serving. It has only one purpose to project the boss of the institution. The large budgets available to these institutes and the lack of accountability means that considerable wastage can be indulged in for the purpose of the personal aggrandizement of the boss. Thus glossy publications-- the emphasis on gloss and not on substance-- with the boss's name up front are frequently showered on the world especially the powers that be. One scholar who spent a short while at a prominent institution told me of how he had written a piece on his Ph. D. dissertation but that it was published by the research institute with the boss's name first.
The boss frequently spends a lot on his projection. Elaborate conferences are arranged at five star hotels. The prime minister or the president are invited to open the conference so that the boss can look good. Foreign dignitaries are invited to court and treated royally again to make the court of the boss look more resplendent.
Researchers in these institutes must realize early on that they have only one function that of serving the boss, says an aspiring young scholar in strategic studies who served in one of these academic institutions. All the employees of these institutions that I talked to said that they felt like serfs. They had no say at all in the running of the institute. Nor had they any recourse to appeal against the dictatorial rule of the boss.
One woman, a scholar in sociology likened these institutes to jagirs. Just as in olden times kings would reward favorites or buy prominent opponents with the award of a title and a Jagir (fiefdom), the government of Pakistan awards these institutes as political favors or bribes, she argues. Oftentimes a retired official or some politically important individual that the government wished to confer a favor upon, was awarded such an institution. At times such an institution has been created solely for the purpose of providing a favorite a fiefdom. Once the job has been given annual financial allocations are made available to the now boss and no account is ever taken. The boss now gets umpteen personal benefits such as status in society, a house a car servants, all bills paid as well as a large budget that can be made subject to much creative accounting. Within his little institute he is now a duke or a jagiradar. He can rule his jagir doing what he wishes till he does not incur any displeasure of the current regime.
Such institutions have been allowed to increase rapidly over the years. They, or should I say their bosses, have been 'flourishing' comfortable in their large budgetary allocations. Most serious academics concede that these institutes have done no serious work that can justify their large budgetary claims. The institutes have a rigidly authoritarian structure designed not to enhance work but to ensure a lengthy tenure and maximum benefits for the boss of the institution. Surprisingly there is no effort to look into the finances, productivity, and the bosses of these so-called academic, cultural and other institutions. The silence of newspapers on this waste is indeed amazing!