7th pay commission: Good news for 17 lakh employees, salary hike with 3-year arrears may come soon

Good news related to pay hike beyond the recommendations of the seventh pay commission has come for around 17 lakh state employees. The Maharashtra government has announced that the employees will get pay hike beyond the 7th CPC and not just this, the government will also provide arrears for three years. CM Devendra Fadnavis had earlier announced that implementations of the seventh pay commission will come into effect in January, 2019. 

Citing sources, a Zee News report stated that the government has decided that employees will also get arrears for the last three years along with the increased salary.   

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. 

Earlier, 17 lakh employees in Maharshtra went on a 3-day strike, 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.

However, the strike 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.

Meanwhile, hopes of pay hike of around 50 lakh central government employees under the Seventh pay commission got a blow due to a report by the Reserve Bank of India, the employees are worried that pay hike might become a far fetched dream as the RBI has raised inflation concern over revised House Rent allowance (HRA) and experts feel that pay hike might not come, keeping in mind the rising inflation and RBI's observations. 

RBI last week decided to increase the policy repo rate by 25 basis points to 6.5%. The reverse repo rate has been hiked to 6.25%, the RBI announced after its three-day Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting.

RBI in its report mentioned that inflation rates have increased on account of implementation of 7th Pay Commission. The revised HRA structure came into place in July 2017 under the 7th Pay Commission.

Currently, the Central government employees are getting basic pay according to the fitment formula of 2.57 of the basic pay and if this big step is taken, it will come as a massive news for the Central government employees. Fitment factor is a figure used by 7th CPC with which the basic pay in 6th CPC regime (i.e Pay in Pay band + Grade pay) is multiplied in order to fix basic pay in revised pay structure (i.e 7th CPC). Fitment factor formulated by 7th CPC is 2.57.