Government refuses to give Rs 400 hike to IIS babus

The way government functions appears strange sometimes. A small group of junior level Indian Information Service (IIS) officers are fighting for the last many years to get a paltry salary hike of just Rs 400 a month. It would translate into burden on exchequer of a few lakh rupees a year. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 20, 2013, 01:47:36 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The way government functions appears strange sometimes. A small group of junior level Indian Information Service (IIS) officers are fighting for the last many years to get a paltry salary hike of just Rs 400 a month. It would translate into burden on exchequer of a few lakh rupees a year.

But, the government is not willing to provide the relief even though the sixth pay commission had recommended the increase by merging the junior grade with the senior grade. The pay commission wanted one grade for junior level IIS officers to make administration of the cadre easier.

The Information and Broadcasting ministry initially decided to merge the two levels — three and four of IIS — in 2010 but had a change of heart within a few months. The apparent reason was insistence of the finance ministry that such a merger cannot take place.

The finance ministry did not agree with the I&B ministry that the merger would help better management of cadre and insisted on continuing with the junior cadre as an induction point for officials to work under senior level IIS officers.

The aggrieved IIS officers of these grades describe it as injustice to them and say that the government has failed to implement the six pay commission recommendations approved by the Union Cabinet.

"We left our journalistic career to join government service thinking it would lead to career growth. But nothing like that has happened," said one of the IIS officers. For many, stagnation at one post for years is a reason for losing interest in work which primarily handles government's publicity.

These officers about 140 in number believe that the senior IIS officials were against the merger as it would have resulted in lesser promotion avenues for them. In the Indian pyramid type bureaucratic system, the posts at the senior levels are directly proportionate to the persons employed at the lower levels.

If there are more people at the lowest level, then there can be more posts at all the levels above. That is an apparent reason for I&B recent recruitment at the junior most level in the information service and in official parlance it is described as cadre management.

The entire exercise has left a small group of IIS officers feeling cheated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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