7th Pay Commission: Ahead of Holi festival and Lok Sabha elections, the union cabinet on Tuesday announced 3% hike in the dearness allowance for central government employees, which is effective from January 1, 2019. According to reports in a leading website, this initiative of the government would benefit a huge section of the government employees and pensioners, as told by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in an interview after the cabinet meeting in Delhi.
Reportedly, this initiative cost the exchequer around 9000 crores. The 3% increase has been announced over the existing 9% D.A allowance , which has been recommended under the 7th Central Pay Commission. This move will benefit about 48.41 lakh central government employees and 62.03 lakh pensioners. Since this hike is effective from January, employees will get arrears for that particular month. Reports also say that the Centre had earlier increased DA by 2% to 7% in the month of March last fiscal followed by another another hike in August by 2% to 9%.
There have been other major developments made under the 7th pay commission by the government recently, one is the 300 per cent hike in the allowance for the central government employees handling cash and treasury and the other is the running allowance for the railway employees, according ot reports in BS. Earlier, it was speculated that the Narendra Modi-led government might announce hike in Dearness Allowance before the Lok Sabha Election, which actually happened. Meanwhile, the central employees were unhappy with the central government for not paying heed to their demands lately, however, this move might give some relief to them.
