New Delhi, April 27 :    New Delhi, April 27:  Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd employees in the group C and D category will get a pay hike of minimum Rs 1,500 a month but will have to work for a day more in a week. This decision will cost the public sector telecom company about Rs 1,000 crore. The pay hike to the two groups, which account for more than 3 lakh employees out of BSNL's total workforce of 5 lakh, will be given with retrospective effect from October 1, 2000. A pay agreement was signed on Friday night by a joint committee of BSNL employees unions and the management. Sources in BSNL said: 'This was one of the demands that the group C and D employees had made while being transferred from the department of telecommunications to BSNL. We have accepted their demands hoping that they will understand the compulsions of a corporate work culture. The employees will have to work six days a week from five days a week.' The basic pay of non-executives from October 2000 under the industrial dearness allowance (IDA) pattern will be fixed at the stage corresponding to the stage they had reached under central dearness allowance scheme on September 30, 2000. Pay fixation would be on a point-to-point basis. Net minimum increase of Rs 1,500 per month will be allowed to each employee. The ad hoc payment of Rs 1,000 per month being given to these employees since October 2000 will be adjusted against the emoluments to be incorporated in the IDA pattern. The DA (from October 2000 at 28 per cent) will be revised once in three months. The BSNL Employees Unions had been demanding a pay scale equal to that of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. But the management had refused to accept the demand alleging that it might trigger off a demand from MTNL employees for a higher pay. As a result, the group C and D employees of BSNL will get a salary which will be about Rs 500 less than their counterparts in MTNL. The employees in the two groups who opted for absorption in BSNL were on deemed deputation from October 2000, the day BSNL was formed. Therefore the new pay scales will be effective from October 2000. 'We had demanded hike in our salary equal to that of MTNL employees working in the same category, they too had been recruited by DoT on the same criteria and then went on deputation to MTNL and later absorbed. But we reconciled to the promise that management would reconsider our demands based on our performance,' said V.A.N Namboodri, general secretary of BSNL Employees Union. BSNL officials said the move should help the company ward off any trouble from the most crucial part of the human resource, in telecom terms 'the last mile' connectors. The company is likely to now focus on training them the new corporate culture and customer relations. 'BSNL needs them, particularly now when the mobile and other value added services are to be rolled out by the company,' said a senior official.