Cabinet meets to deliberate upon Seventh Pay Commission recommendations

A meeting of the Union Cabinet to deliberate upon the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission is presently on at the South Block here.

According to reports, the Commission has recommended an average 23.55 percent increase in the salaries, allowances and pension of the government employees.

The recommendations submitted by the Empowered Committee of Secretaries, which was formed to look into recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission, is likely to benefit 4.8 million employees and 5.5 million pensioners.

The Centre had earlier in January set up a panel headed by Cabinet Secretary P. K. Sinha to process the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission, which is expected to change the remuneration of 47 lakh central government employees and 52 lakh pensioners.

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had in his Budget for 2016-17 provisioned Rs. 70,000 crore towards the Seventh Pay Commission, which is around 60 percent of the incremental expenditure on salaries.

The Commission's recommendations are due from January 1, 2016.

The implementation of new pay scales recommended by the Seventh Pay Commission is estimated to put an additional burden of Rs 1.02 lakh crore on the exchequer annually.