Govt offers allowances for bad climate, cycles and even hair cut!

Government employees are resisting the pay panel's suggestion on scrapping allowances for acting, bad climate, family planning, funeral, robe maintenance and even hair cut!

Image: ‘The number of allowances paid to government employees in India is quite large and there are demands for even more allowances’. Photograph: PTI

Guess what are some of the allowances the 7th central pay commission (CPC) wants abolished or subsumed but which representatives and unions of the central government’s 4.7 million employees are resisting?

Some of these are acting allowance, bad climate allowance, assisting cashier allowance, cash handling allowance, cycle allowance, condiment allowance, diet allowance, family planning allowance, flying squad allowance, funeral allowance, hair cutting allowance, higher proficiency allowance, hutting allowance, language allowance, launch campaign allowance, and metropolitan allowance.

Those are some of the ones from A to M. The N-Z list has overtime allowance, out-turn allowance, rajbhasha allowance, rajdhani allowance, robe allowance, robe maintenance allowance, secret allowance, shoe allowance, shorthand allowance, soap toilet allowance, spectacle allowance, treasury allowance, tribal area allowance, vigilance allowance and washing allowance.

Of 196 allowances, the CPC report had recommended abolition of 52 altogether and subsuming of another 36 into larger existing ones.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Finance Secretary Ashok Lavasa had said on Wednesday that further review of these recommendations on allowances was necessary.

“The government will study these recommendations further, as these have far-reaching consequences. The representatives of the employees had conveyed that they don’t want the Centre to approve (what was) recommended. They wanted further examination,” a senior official told Business Standard on Thursday.

Jaitley had announced in the post-cabinet media briefing on Wednesday that a committee under Lavasa would examine the suggestions on allowances. It will have four months to report, after which the Cabinet would decide.

It must be noted that the CPC has in no way suggested the cumulative outgo for allowances be reduced. If its recommendations are accepted, the Centre will have to spend an additional Rs 29,700 crore on these in 2016-17.

“The number of allowances paid to government employees in India is quite large and there are demands for even more allowances. The trend worldwide, however, is otherwise–to include most of the additional items of remuneration as part of the basic pay and minimise the number of allowances,” the CPC had said.

A deferment means as opposed to a burden of Rs 1.02 lakh crore as envisaged by the 7th CPC, the government has provisioned for Rs 84,933 crore so far for pay and pension, including Rs 12,000 crore in arrears.

There are other suggestions on allowances which the panel led by Lavasa will examine. These include changing the present system of accounting, wherein pay and allowances are clubbed and it is difficult to bifurcate these.

The CPC recommended a separate object head for budgeting and accounting be used to record the expenditure on allowances.

SOME OF THE ALLOWANCES 7TH CPC RECOMMENDED FOR ABOLITION