E-Paper
NDA government may call all-party meet on MPs’ salary hike
The NDA government may soon call an all-party meeting to form a permanent mechanism, in the line of the pay commission, which would recommend hike in salary and perks for MPs from time to time.
The NDA government may soon call an all-party meeting to form a permanent mechanism, in the line of the pay commission, which would recommend hike in salary and perks for MPs from time to time.
Salary hike has remained a touchy issue for parliamentarians as the current process of MPs deciding their own salaries has often come under criticism.
An inter-party parliamentary panel had recently proposed a 100% hike in the basic salary of parliamentarians, apart from similar increase in some other perks.
A Rajya Sabha or a Lok Sabha MP now gets `50,000 basic salary along with Rs 45,000 each for constituency and office allowances.
The panel, headed by BJP’s Yogi Adityanath, had met on Wednesday but parliamentary affairs ministry remained non-committal to the demands.
Several MPs, according to a source, maintained that their salaries are lower than even senior bureaucrats’ even as parliamentarians enjoy a higher status in the Warrant of Precedence.
The government informed the panel that the proposals have not been cleared yet by the Union cabinet. JD(U) leader KC Tyagi and Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury maintained there was a need for a permanent mechanism to fix salaries and allowances.
Meanwhile, the K Chandrasekhar Rao government in Telangana is reconsidering a proposal to hike the salaries of the state legislators to Rs 3 lakh, marking a three-fold increase.
