The senior officials of the State medical and health services are taking Non Practicing Allowance (NPA) in their salaries, though they are performing administrative duties while sitting in their offices. The NPA is paid to the Government doctors as an incentive so that they do not engage in private practice and thus do justice to the patients they are serving.
This issue assumes significance as the State is suffering from acute shortage of Medical Officers in all its hospitals and health centres. To make matters worse, the senior doctors colluded with the politicians and bureaucrats to increase the number of posts at the top of health services. The number of Directors, Additional directors and Joint Directors has increased over the years, but the number of doctors in the field who actually serve the patients has shown a sharp decline thus making a top heavy system of health services in the state. The hierarchy is so skewed that there are as many as 170 directors and only 470 Medical Officers in the department. The NPA could have been a tool for luring the doctors to the hospital and field duties had it not been paid to the doctors who are officiating as administrators.
The union of doctors in the State is very powerful as they inherited a robust organization from Uttar Pradesh when the new state was created in the year 2000. There organization was successful in getting pay parity with their central government counterparts. The Tikku commission recommended an increase in NPA from 15 per cent to 25per cent of basic pay which the Uttarakhand government readily implemented in the state. As per the sixth pay commission the pay band of an additional director rank officer is 37,000-67,000 with a grade pay of 8,900, a back of envelope calculation puts the NPA component of these officers at about Rs 16,750 per month.
One of senior officer of Health department who naturally does not comes from the Medical background told this correspondent that the Government should review its decision of granting NPA to the senior doctors working in administrative capacities, adding that morally it is wrong on part of these officers to claim the NPA. The Director Plan, Budget and Stores Dr Kl Arya told The Pioneer that giving NPA to the officers engaged in administrative works is perfectly justified as they are actually certified doctors. He added that the issue was never objected to in any departmental audit so far.