7th pay commission: Good news for Jammu & Kashmir employees

The government of Jammu and Kashmir has decided to implement the recommendations of the seventh pay commission. With this move Jammu and Kasmir has become first state to do so. The J&K employees would get their revised salaries from this month. The J&K government announced the good news from its twitter handle on Tuesday.

"As already announced by Govt, the employees to draw revised scales of pay from current month,” the state information department said on Twitter.

The government also notified that the necessary information regarding implementation of the 7th Pay Commission recommendations will be issued by the state Finance Department by Tuesday evening.

"J&K is the first state to implement the recommendations of the seventh Pay Commission after Centre's implementation two years ago," J&K finance minister Altaf Bukhari said.

Meanwhile, as the hopes of around 50 lakh government employees got shattered after minister of State for Finance, P. Radhakrishnan, had said that currently the government has no plans to increase the minimum salary beyond the seventh pay recommendations. At present, the Central government employees are getting basic pay according to the fitment formula of 2.57 of the basic pay.

Fitment factor is a figure used by 7th CPC with which the basic pay in 6th CPC regime (i.e Pay in Pay band + Grade pay) is multiplied in order to fix basic pay in revised pay structure (i.e 7th CPC).

However, the employees were demanding to raise the minimum basic pay to Rs 21,000 instead of Rs 18,000, the amount seventh pay commission recommended. But now, if media reports are to be believed, it has been reported that despite the government's statement, the news related to the hike in salary might come before the 2019 general elections.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his aggressive campaign before the Tripura polls had said that the state employees would get seventh pay commission benefits when BJP would come to power.

PM Modi said, "the BJP government was committed to implementing seventh pay commission scales in the state if the party comes to power".

Now, taking cues from the earlier incident, employees are hoping that the government might announce the good news before the general elections next year.