7th pay commission: 17 lakh employees end strike

Around 17 lakh employees in Maharashtra ended their 3-day long strike, after the Fadnavis government agreed to accept three demands from immediate effect, news agency ANI reported. The state employees in Maharshtra went on a 3-day strike on August 7. The employees were demanding a pay hike and the earliest implementation of the seventh pay recommendations. However, it should be noted that around 1.5 lakh gazetted officers withdrew from the strike after a Government Resolution (GR) was issued on Monday night stating that the pending arrears of the Dearness Allowance (DA) for a period of 14 months will be paid to them.

Earlier, the Fadnavis government also issued a resolution stating that the implementation will happen in January 2019. 

"The arrears of 7th Pay Commission will be given retrospective from January 2016 while the Dearness Allowance will be retrospective for the last 14 months," the chief minister said in a statement after chairing a meeting with the unions. 

The decision will impose an additional burden of a whopping Rs 21,000 crore on the exchequer, as per the government estimate Rs 4,800 crore would be allocated for the implementation of Pay Commission in the Budget. 

It should be noted that the state government in its resolution also made it clear that if the implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission gets delayed, the employees will be eligible for the benefit as per the wage structure of the Central government employees from January 2019. 

Maharashtra Rajya Sarkari Karmachari Madhyavarti Sanghatna general secretary Avinash Daund said that class 3 and 4 government employees have joined the strike. He accused the state government of paying a mere "lip-service" to their long-pending demands.

However, the three-day strike launched by state government employees from Tuesday seemed to have lost some steam on the second day, with offices recording higher attendance on Wednesday.

Around 77.30 per cent of the around 7,678 officers and employees in the state administrative headquarters of the Mantralaya and the New Administrative Building, who record their attendance through bio-metrics, had reported for duty on Wednesday. This is higher than the 70.64 per cent attendance recorded on Tuesday.

The average attendance for class A and B category employees in the Mantralaya was 78.97 per cent and 82.45 per cent, respectively, and at 56.59 per cent for C and D category staff. However, this stood at 83.32 per cent for A and B class officials and 70 per cent and 37.28 per cent for C and D class employees on Tuesday. A meeting between striking employees and state Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar failed to yield a breakthrough on Tuesday.