Skip to main content

Retirement Politics


80-year-old men call a meeting of 70-year-old men to decide the retirement age of some 60-year-old people. This is what’s happening in India. My state of Kerala recently raised the retirement age to 60 for people working in the state’s PSUs. There were immediate protests from the Congress which recently elected an 80-year-old man as their president and the BJP which worships a 72-year-old Prime Minister who is all set for another term in the next election when he will be 74.

There is a serious unemployment problem in Kerala and hence hampering the opportunities of the youth for employment by raising the retirement age of existing staff is unjust. That is the argument. But Kerala’s life expectancy is 77 and why should one retire at 56? Instead of asking people to retire, the government should discover/create new job opportunities for the youth.

If politicians can continue to work at the age of 80, why can’t the common man too? Karunanidhi was in office at the age of 87. So was Jyoti Basu. Joe Biden is 79. 91-year-old Rupert Murdoch continues to rule the media. 92-year-old Warren Buffet is the chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway. We can cite umpteen such examples. Kerala’s Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, is 77. A significant number of Kerala’s MLAs are above 70. But when it comes to you and me, these oldies will decide when we should stop working. 


Now the flip side. Quite many of the government employees in Kerala don’t deserve to be in office at all. They have no work to do or they don’t do their work. You go to a government office to get your job done and they will harass you every way possible until you bribe them and their clerks and their peons and their drivers handsomely.

Take the simple case of the state’s government and government-aided schools. These schools hardly have students. There are two such schools in my village: one primary and the other high school. Both together have about 30 students and half as many staff. These staff are paid by the government and they get handsome pay packets. I teach in a school in the nearby town and the school is purely private. The school is funded totally by the fees paid by the students. There are 2300 students and over 100 teachers. It’s an efficient system in spite of the fact that the staff are paid far, far less than their government counterparts.

Why do we need government institutions at all, I often wonder. There’s hardly any work done there. 

Comments

  1. The Moon's BOYFRIEND November 2, 2022 at 2:07 PM

    Money and power... that's all that matter age doesn't stand a chance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2022 at 7:02 PM

      True. This present amendment is made to favour some particular individuals who are close to the CM, I think.

      Mercifully, KSRTC & KSEB Employees are not included. It would have been ridiculous otherwise. They are nothing more than highway thieves.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanNovember 2, 2022 at 5:19 PM

    Hari OM
    In both OZ and UK, retirment age is now 67. It gets moved every upward the closer a certain group of us (ie me and thee and such) get to it. Meaning that official retirement - and therefore pension - will never arrive. I am retired on a very small, but adequate (so far) private pension which is unlikely to last as long as I do. What will the government do with me then, if they have shifted the goalposts as to the pension I paid taxes for all those years and they don't want to give me... Will the youth they want to put in jobs be willing to pay for my food and board? All governments currently focused on 'growth economics' ignore their elderly - unless those elderly have money and power. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2022 at 7:07 PM

      India pampers its government employees with good salaries as well as pensions. Private sector employees slog all life, get a pittance for wages, and are excluded from any worthwhile pension scheme. We have a terribly discriminatory system. But who cares? Those who have the power to care are the beneficiaries of the existing system, so they won't change it.

      Delete
  3. Sonia DograNovember 2, 2022 at 9:19 PM

    You have a point about politicians staying in their jobs even at 90! Unjust. Absolutely. Honestly we need to work on our population if we must resolve these issues. All other solutions will only be temporary.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 3, 2022 at 6:33 AM

      Our politicians must change, I feel, for greater changes to happen. People are helpless without a leader. Our current leaders are all self-centered people.

      Delete
  4. Rajeev MoothedathNovember 4, 2022 at 11:53 AM

    A very interesting and engaging post on the subject! It is business as usual for the average citizen. Policies will not change in line with their needs or welfare but interests of those in power.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 4, 2022 at 2:55 PM

      And now the pension rule is revoked! Why doesn't our government think before it announces policies? You're right, the ordinary citizen just has to go on.

      Delete
  5. Voice from the roof topNovember 4, 2022 at 5:29 PM

    Good thought

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...
22 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...
8 comments
Read more

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...
12 comments
Read more