7th Pay Commission latest news: Pay gap among central government employees is still a problem

By India.com News Desk on August 10, 2016

New Delhi, August 10: In June the Union Cabinet approved the recommendations made by the 7th Pay Commission, effective from January 1. The 7th Pay Commission implementation will directly affect more than 47 lakh central government employees and 53 lakh pensioners. Price rise, inflation were some of the factors considered by the 7CPC committee but after the increase in minimum wage, pay gap seems to be a real problem with which the union government is still unable to fight.

In June the cabinet decided to implement the 7th Pay Commission recommendations for an average 14.27 per cent hike in basic pay, surpassing the 30per cent hike in basic pay recommended by Justice AK Mathur led committee. 

For Cabinet secretary level employee the pay has been increased to Rs 2,50,000 (fixed) which was Rs 90,000 (fixed) under the 6th Pay Commission recommendation. This means that the rates of Cabinet secretary level government employee have been increased to 178 per cent.

The minimum wage of lowest grade government employee has lifted to Rs 18,000 from Rs 7,000. Which means the rate of increase is 157 per cent. Due to which experts believe that the pay gap among central government employees is still a big problem.

According to reports, the Central government is likely to pay the hiked salary in next few days. It has also been reported that the employees will get their seven-month arrears in one shot. It is quite noteworthy that the Narendra Modi has a backlog of seven months arrears, compared to the 6th Pay Commission, which came in late.

According to reports, the implementation of 7CPC will cost the government exchequer Rs 1.02 lakh crore annually.

In July, a week after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley took a press conference informing about implementations of 7CPC, central government employees union had threatened to go on indefinite strike as most of them are not happy with the increase in minimum wage. The Class-1 employees had earlier requested to increase the minimum wage to Rs 26,000 instead of Rs 18,000.