Secretaries Group To Revise 7th Pay Commission Recommendations

Secretaries Group To Revise 7th Pay Commission Recommendations

New Delhi: Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha who is heading the Empowered Committee or Secretaries group is likely to hand over a report on the revised pay structures of 7th pay commission recommendations to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley by the end of next month.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said government had requisite fund to implement 7th pay commission award. Cabinet Secretary Sinha will finally make his appearance before the the Empowered Committee or Secretaries group on June 11 to make a proposal on the recommendations of 7th Pay Commission before cabinet nod.

recommendations to be submitted by June “The proposal will be placed before the Cabinet after the finance ministry’s review. We don’t think it will take more time for Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s consideration and the new pay structures will be implemented from July after cabinet nod,” said a top official from the Finance Ministry who did not wish to be named.

The 7th Pay Commission headed by Justice A K Mathur submitted the report on November 19. It had proposed the highest salary at Rs 250,000 and the lowest at Rs 18,000. The commission also recommended 14.27 per cent increase in basic pay, 23.55% overall increase in salary, allowances and pensions.

The increase in allowances was recommended 63% while pension was proposed to rise 24%. Finance Minister Jaitley is likely to agree with the Secretaries group. “I think it should not be touched again,” the official said. Once the new structure is implemented, salaries of around 48 lakh central government employees and 52 lakh pensioners will rise by 30 percent. The Finance Minister already said the 7th pay commission award would not make the commodity prices to go up.

The central government employees and pensioners will also spend more money on a variety of goods after receiving the 7th Commission award with arrears from January 2016. “This means higher consumption similar to what happened in the past. But the previous two Pay Commission awards came with a lag of two years. So the arrears were large.

This time, it will not be so,” says Pronab Sen, former Chief Statistician, government of India and now Country Director, International Growth Centre, a think tank based at LSE, run in partnership with University of Oxford.

The official also agrees with Sen and said there was no possibility of any impact of the report on the market at this stage of implementation as there were no impacts when the Pay Commission had first submitted the report. The government formed a 13 member secretary-level Empowered Committee or Secretaries group headed by Sinha in January to review the report of the 7th Pay Commission before cabinet nod. The 7th pay commission was set up by the UPA government in February 2014. It submitted the report after around 22 months. After getting the 7th pay commission report, the finance minister Jaitley while introducing the Seventh Pay Commission report on November 19, already said that the final decisions on the Seventh Pay Commission report took five and a half months including the process of Secretaries group. Finance Minister also said, government had requisite fund to implement it.

The secretary group is likely to propose pay structure of minimum at Rs 21,000 and the maximum at Rs 2,70,000 Accordingly, the Secretaries group is likely to reach the conclusion to propose 30 percent basic pay raise instead of 14.27 per cent, which was recommended by 7th Pay Commission.

They are also mulling for doubling of existing rates of such allowances and advances, which has been recommended for abolition by the 7th Pay Commission, sources said. TST