New Delhi, March 24: A phone receiver in hand, the joint secretary in the ministry of human resource development in Shastri Bhavan furiously scribbled and calculated on the back of an envelope.
“Ha... so what does it come to? I think it’s just a Rs 4,000 hike per month for me, yaar. After all the hoopla...,” he laughed into the phone, his voice laced with a tinge of cynicism.
The hangover of the long weekend continued for government officials with the Sixth Pay Commission submitting its recommendations today. Monday morning blues were replaced by an optimism laced with the inertia of rest.
Across Delhi’s government offices, bureaucrat and stenographer, peon and general sought copies of the report, pored over little sheafs of printouts from the Net and did back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how the recommendations would impact them.
The flurry of activity — or inactivity, depending on your point of view — mirrored the anxiety of millions of central government employees across India. The central government is the largest employer in the country.
Police personnel and soldiers posted in the Northeast and in remote regions without access to the details telephoned their colleagues in headquarters here to get instant wisdom on the new wage structure. Pensioners called up old colleagues to ask what the hike meant for them.
Much of the anxiety is justified. The central government is set to hike salaries after 11 years. Second, the pay commission’s 650-page report is a dense document that lays down indices and formulae but does not immediately reveal how much each government babu will take home at the end of the month.
At the end of the day, not many were really happy. A bureaucrat in the ministry of women and child development, also in Shastri Bhavan, complained that the TV news was misleading. In the defence ministry, a brigadier asked his junior to ask a regimental colleague in the adjutant general’s office upstairs to clarify.
The bureaucrat in Shastri Bhavan admitted that for months now, she had been scanning every report for news on the commission’s recommendations. “Today, that is all everyone is thinking about. For several hours, I was just trying to understand what it means for people like me.
“Now that I do understand, I think it’s a let-down,” she said.
Another joint secretary in the HRD complained that the hike was “grossly insufficient to retain or get talent”.
“My son — a lawyer — gets paid Rs 18 lakh a year. What’s the incentive for young people to join government service?” he wondered aloud. Probably, he need not worry so much.
An XLRI Jamshedpur study, commissioned by the Sixth Pay Commission, had noted that among the relational benefits acceptable to most government employees are job security, respect in society, balance between work and life, opportunity to be part of the larger cause of serving the country and variety in job profile.
But for much of today, these did not play out in the voices of central government employees. “Unlike the last report, where there was a formula, here there is no way we can understand how much we will get, so let’s wait and watch,” said an official in the ministry of culture.
Officers in the paramilitary forces were disappointed the pay commission recommendations did not see the central forces in the same light as the defence forces. “We are keeping our fingers crossed on how the jawans will react,” said one of them.
