Govt to discuss pay report at next Cabinet meeting

With high-powered Committee of Secretaries (CoS) headed by Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar handing over the Sixth Pay Commission report suggesting a few cosmetic changes, the government is now likely to consider it in the next meeting of the Union Cabinet.
Informing about this, a senior Union Cabinet minister on the condition of anonymity said, "In the next meeting of the Cabinet, the Pay Commission report would be discussed and hopefully a decision will be arrived at."
The CoS, even after reviewing the entire report and going through the grievances raised by various sections of the government employees, however failed to address all the concerns and instead it suggested hiving off the arrears by 18 months.
This means that instead of these to be computed from January 1, 2006, as suggested by the Pay Commission, the employees should get from July 1, 2007.
As per the report, a copy of which is with this newspaper, defence service personnel, paramilitary forces and other security personnel would, however, get flat increase of 15 per cent in their salary.
Interestingly, the report has also suggested increasing annual increment of four per cent of the basic and dearness allowance instead of 2.5.
Since there were widespread discontents among government employees with the original recommendations of the Pay Commission, the government had decided to constitute a high-powered CoS to review them.
The CoS, though looked into the demands of the armed forces for whom even defence minister A.K. Antony chipped in to persuade Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister P. Chidambaram and suggested something to soothe them, the concerns of other sections of the government employees, including that of police service personnel and group B and C staff, have been ignored.
The Indian Police Service (IPS) personnel have consistently been lobbying to become at par with Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officials. But their demands have been ignored.
Similarly, the CoS tried to address the salary slab anomalies by reducing it to only 15 category instead of 25 originally suggested to meet the demands of the group-B&C employees.
Sources in the government said, "Hopefully, the Union Cabinet, when it takes up the matter, will refer it to a GoM, headed by a senior minister."