Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today tried to allay apprehensions among civil and defence personnel over unfair treatment by the Sixth Pay Commission, saying he favoured "proper remuneration" for them. He was addressing government servants at the third Civil Service Day function in New Delhi.
The Sixth Pay Commission, headed by retired Justice B N Srikrishna, recently submitted its report and several civil and defence personnel bodies expressed dissatisfaction with what they termed unfair distribution of pay hikes across the spectrum of government employees in India.
"I would like our civil and defence services to be properly rewarded. I also believe that the taxpayers will not grudge anyone of us better remuneration as long as we are serving the best interests of our people, most efficiently," Singh told them.
He said the government has already set in motion a mechanism for hearing and redressing the grievances of the government servants. In the wake of criticism over the recommendations, the government last week announced the setting up of a high-level official committee headed by Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar to process the report of the sixth Pay Commission.
Observing that improved conditions of work "must go hand-in-hand with improvement in work," Singh said given the government’s deep commitment towards the welfare of all its employees equally, "I would also expect the highest standards of discipline and decorum from all civil servants."
The prime minister, however, also expressed concern over the fact that more needed to be done in terms of delivery systems of certain social sector programmes. "Our early feedback on some of our flagship programmes like Bharat Nirman, National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, National Rural Health Mission and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan are generally positive though not uniform across states. There are certain programmes especially in areas like food distribution, nutrition and basic health services where we need to and we must do much more. We have increased outlays, so the financial constraint has eased, but it is your managerial challenge to ensure that the outcomes are also now better than ever before," he said.
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