After much delay (30 months to be precise), the Union cabinet recently approved the Seventh Pay Commission’s recommendations hiking salaries of central government employees as well as pensions.
While those in private sectors are seeing this with raised eyebrows, as minimum pay will be Rs 18,000 per month, and the upper ceiling at Rs 2,25,000 a month, government employees are not very happy.
In fact, they have threatened to go on strike from July 11. Speaking to reporters, Shivgopal Mishra, General Secretary, All India Railway Men Federation and Convenor of National Joint Council of Action (NJCA), said, “They have fixed the minimum wage at a meagre Rs 18,000 in the Seventh Pay Commission. In the last Pay Commission, the basic pay was Rs 7,000. They gave Rs 18,000. We are demanding Rs 26,000.”
NJCA is a front formed by six government staff unions and have decided to oppose the hikes given by the Seventh Pay Commission.
According to Mishra, lakhs of government employees, excluding the defence personnel, will go on strike if we do not get some kind of assurance from the government to reconsider the decision.
KKN Kutty, president of Confederation of Central Government Employees and general secretary of national coordination committee of pensioners association, said: "We are waiting to hear back on this from the government by July 5. In our meeting, it was only a verbal commitment. If the government gives us specific details like which committee will review, etc. then we will defer the strike. We have a meeting on July 5 to decide on the strike."
The Sixth Pay Commission had recommended a 20 per cent increase, which the UPA government doubled while implementing it in 2008. The resultant hit to the exchequer of 0.77 per cent of GDP doubled the Centre’s fiscal deficit to 6 per cent in 2008-09, the year it was implemented.
The Seventh Pay Commission's chairman is Justice A.K. Mathur, while its members are Rathin Roy and Vivek Rae. The increases are to be effective from January 1, 2016.
DOWN THE MEMORY LANE...
On September 25, 2013 the then finance minister P Chidambaram announced that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has approved the constitution of the Seventh Pay Commission. Justice A.K Mathur was named the head, announcement of which was done on 4 February 2014.
In May 2014, a group of retired government officials, challenged the inclusion of a senior IAS officer in the three member Seveth Pay Commission, in the Delhi High Court. They alleged that this would lead an inherent bias in the commission's recommendations towards IAS officers.
Several government services, most notably the armed forces have complained bitterly of down gradation due to pay commissions exceeding their brief, and introducing anomalies in the relative scales of pay of government services. The armed forces represented to the government for the removal of anomalies which it is felt that the civil servants on the commission have deliberately introduced to upgrade themselves vis-a-vis service officers in the defence forces.
The chief justice and other supreme court and high court judges got a threefold salary hike in the sixth pay commission however the trial court judges were paid low and a bench comprising (then) Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justices P Sathasivam and J M Panchal constituted a new pay commission for the trial court judges headed by retired Madras High Court judge, Justice E Padmanabhan for recommendation of revision of about 14000 trial court judges.
This order from the SC came because of a petition filed by All India Judges Association, which stated that the first judicial commission which was headed by Justice Jagannatha Shetty had said that there should be an upward revision of salaries of lower court judges in proportion to the hike to the judges of high court and Supreme Court.
