Pay Hikes at the Centre

It is not for nothing that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who believe that the government in India exists solely for the government employees alone. This week’s announcement of the pay revision for over one crore Central government employees and pensioners says it all. Pay scales for Central government employees have been so substantially revised at the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission as to entail an annual additiol cost of Rs 1.02 lakh crore to the exchequer. The overall increase has been of the order of 23.5 per cent. What clearly underscores the irratiolity of the increases is that the starting salary for new recruits at the lowest level has been raised from Rs 7,000 to Rs 18,000 (more than two-and-a-half times), and a freshly recruited Class I officer will receive Rs 56,100. The maximum pay drawn by the Cabinet Secretary goes up from the current Rs 90,000 to Rs 2.5 lakh per month. This exceeds the salaries of MPs. The Union government seems to have forgotten that the majority in India belong to the unorganized sector. Salary revisions that are directed at making life better for bureaucrats alone cannot be expected to be fair to the people of India as a whole. The entire exercise reflects a callous disregard of India’s unorganized sector and its problems. What this will do to our inflation has also been disregarded by a government that has completely failed to control prices.

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