Confederation of Maharatna Company Officers demands pay revision in public sector enterprises
Officers of India’s leading Maharatna companies have come together to form a confederation, which includes representatives from the Officers Associations of ONGC, SAIl, IOCl, CIl and NTPC. The confederation has approached the government with request for pay revision for officers of CPSEs. The last pay revision had come into effect in January 2007.
leaders of the Confederation of Maharatna Company Officers’ led by Mukul Kumar, Convenor, met the Secretary (Department of Public Enterprises), for advising the concerned CMDs and Boards to initiate the process of pay revision for officers of CPSEs.
The present pay revision was based on the recommendation of second Pay Revision Committee (PRC) constituted by DPE vide resolution dated November 30 2006.The second Pay Revision Committee, under the Chairmanship of Justice (Retd), M J Rao, has opined in the preface of report that “the responsibility of future revision should be given to the Board of Directors of a company subject to the approval of the concerned ministry in discharge of its role as shareholders.”
In line with the directions of the MJ Rao committee, respective associations have raised the issue of pay revision with the Board of Directors of the companies. However, no action is being taken on the requests of the Officers Association of individual companies.
Historically, the pay structure of officers was revised after every five Years during last three decades, except the last pay revision and the periodicity of pay revision used to be recorded in all DPE OMs. It is also worth mentioning that the periodicity has not been mentioned in the DPE OM dated November 26, 2008 for the pay revision effective from Jan’07, on account of the spirit of the aforesaid quoted opinion of the Justice Rao Committee desiring the boards of the CPSEs to take over the task. These views of the MJ Rao committee have also been upheld and further qualified by a panel of experts on reforms in CPSEs constituted by the planning commission, in their report submitted to government of India.
The officers of PSUs are facing a severe hardship in managing their family needs due to severe erosion in the real compensation in view of spiraling inflation during past six years. The following comparison of cost of living under the heads of food items, housing and education etc in 2007 vis-s-vis 2013 is as under-
lThe house rentals have increased by more than 100 per cent since 2007 on pan India basis. As CPSE employees are not insulated on this front, we have to arrange for our residential accommodation ourselves from our salary.
lCost of education is increasing steadily and has become becoming unaffordable. As an indicator, the fees of IIM Ahmedabad for PGP course has increased from 1.77 lakh during 2007 to 7.4 lakh in 2013. The primary & secondary schools fees have escalated, even in higher proportions.
lFurthermore, the cost of food and grocery items has jumped substantially since 2007 making existing salaries grossly inadequate.
The provisions of increase in DA and annual increment of three per cent have failed to counter the escalation in expenditure for basic needs that is food, housing, education. Since House Rent Allowance and other allowances are linked to basic pay only and therefore remain stagnant at 2007 levels, making it inadequate to meet the basic cost of living a middle class urban life. Minimum that can be done to ameliorate the ordeal of officers immediately is merging 50 per cent of DA with basic pay immediately as has been the legacy, wef Jan 2012.