Parliament mulls over govt employee status

The question: Are people working in Parliament govt officials or not? Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 4, 2011, 23:35:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A small housing society in Greater Noida became a controversial issue for the government when it was asked to decide on the status of people working in Parliament.

The question was whether they are government servants or not. For many, those working in Parliament are government servants. But, as per rules, only those appointed by or on behalf of the President and whose pension is charged from the consolidated fund of India are government servants.

The employees of Parliament fall somewhere between the two. They are not appointed by the President but receive pension from the consolidated fund of India. To ensure autonomy of the legislature, they are appointed on the orders of the presiding officers of the two houses — Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.

But, some officials working in the two houses want to end this ambiguity and claim flats meant for the central government employees.

The Central Government Employees Welfare Housing Corporation (CGEWHO) — mandated to build houses for government employees — earlier this year had sought applications for buying flats at a premier location in Greater Noida at a highly subsidised rate.

The ministry for housing and urban poverty alleviation, which manages CGEWHO, received representations from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha Employees Associations for including them under the priority category meant for serving and retired Central government officials, including spouses of deceased employees.

As the issue was also raised in the Lok Sabha through a question, the ministry decided to seek legal opinion and decided to settle the issue once for all.

The final decision is that the officials of Parliament cannot be considered Central government employees. Moreover, ministry officials say that Parliament employees got houses at subsidised rates from different land-owning agencies only because they are not covered under the CGEWHO.

With the issue being settled, the housing organisation has now decided to issue draw of lots for 1,240 flats on next Friday. Over 4,500 applicants for the flats have been found to be eligible and around 450, mostly from Parliament, ineligible.

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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