DHAKA: The government has assured the International Monetary Fund that it will soon introduce merit-based salary structure in the civil service, linking pay with performance of public servants, according to sources in the finance ministry.     The assurance comes after the multilateral lending agency, in a report, asked the government to develop a plan for reforms in the civil service and to align future pay hikes with its structural improvements.  

 The report also stressed rationalisation of the size of the civil service, introduction of a systematic and transparent performance-evaluation procedure for merit-based salary increase and promotion, improve of recruitment procedures and minimisation of public expenditure, source in the finance ministry told New Age.  

 The World Bank will provide assistance for the programme, styled ‘civil service reforms’, which aims at replacing duration of service with merit and performance as the criteria for promotion, the sources added.    The chairman of the sixth pay commission, Mujibul Hoque, expressed serious reservation about the proposed reforms when talking to New Age on Tuesday.   

 The reforms will trigger serious dissatisfaction in the bureaucracy, eventually resulting in deterioration in the quality of the civil service, said the former cabinet secretary.    The finance and planning minister, M. Saifur Rahman, has recently written to the IMF, conveying the government’s readiness to introduce a merit-based salary structure in the civil service.   

  Saifur also laid out a four-point objective of the reforms. “Rationalizing government employment; decompressing the pay scale; establishing a systematic and transparent performance evaluation procedure for merit-based salary increases and promotion; and introducing a tighter link between pay and performance.”    The pay commission chairman said the term ‘merit-based salary system’ was borrowed. Instead, he suggested, the government should redefine and make more comprehensive the criterion of performance for promotion. —By arrangement with NewAge/Dhaka