Some proposals may be dropped

A group of top bureaucrats tasked to examine the sixth central pay commission’s recommendations is expected to push away the panel’s suggestions for changes.

Government officials will get to hear about their pay hike soon but a group of top bureaucrats tasked to examine the sixth central pay commission’s recommendations is expected to push away the panel’s suggestions for changes such as staggered timings for women and a performance related incentive scheme for the bureaucracy.

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The committee of secretaries headed by Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar has completed the exercise of hearing the viewpoint of all major departments, an exercise that largely saw the committee listening to government officials’ complain about how the pay panel had been unfair to them.

“We shall be giving our response to each of the recommendation of the committee in our report,” a member of the committee that has nearly a dozen secretaries, or their equivalents in the government hierarchy, as members.

The official said the government hadn’t fixed a deadline for the committee, but it was targeting to complete its deliberations by this month-end or early July.

By the time the committee wraps up its deliberations, the official said some of the concerns of armed forces and the central police organisations would be addressed.

Also, the department of personnel is expected to back the argument of the employees that the hike recommended by the panel had erred in calculation of the salary earned by employees in January 2006 and the fixation of the new pay bands, leading to a loss of 12 per cent for the staff.

“A decision on this point, however, will primarily rest with the expenditure department, which will have to see the availability of funds," a senior official said. It would be reasonable to expect some improvement when the committee tries to fix the broad anomalies.

The commission had recommended several changes like staggered timings for women, introduction of performance related incentives, forcing central para-military services to recruit personnel from ex-servicemen after they complete 17 years of service in the armed forces and cutting down the number of gazetted holidays after nearly 17 days to three.