India constitutes seperate pay commission for armed forces

New Delhi, Jan 1 (PTI) In a major New year bonanza for
Indian armed forces, the Prime Minister's Office has informed
the Defence Ministry that the armed forces personnel would
henceforth have a separate pay commission, which is delinked
from the civilian pay panel.

In a communication to the Defence Ministry the PMO
also granted the demand for placing 12,000 odd Lieutenant
Colonels under equivalence in Navy and Air Force in the pay
band four of the sixth central pay commission.

However, the PMO, which considered the recommendations of
the ministerial committee headed by Indian External Affairs
minister Pranab Mukherjee, said that the pay band four status
with a grade pay of Rs 8000 would be accorded to Lieutenant
Colonels who were performing a combat role or were ready for
combat.

Those Lieutenant Colonels on deputation to other services
would receive the pay band four status only when they return
to their parent service.

Another demand accepted by the PMO concerned the jawans,
for whom the government would restore the 70 percent
pensionary weightage.

Till the government implements the sixth pay commission's
recommendations for allowing retired armed forces personnel's
lateral entry into paramilitary and central police forces, the
70 per cent weightage would continue.

The present PMO communication, sent to the Defence
Ministry in the last week of December, however, is silent on
the two other core demands of the armed forces: placing the
Lieutenant Generals in the higher administrative grade plus
pay scales and bringing grade pay of officers from Captains to
Brigadiers on par with their civilian counterparts.

But, conceding to the Defence personnel's demand the PMO
said it would set up a high powered committee to review the
command and control functions, and the status of the armed
forces vis-a-vis that of their civilian and paramilitary
counterparts.

Though Defence Ministry assumed that the PMO's
communication is a fiat to the armed forces, the nitty gritty
of implementing them would have to be worked out in concert
with the services headquarters, officials said.

After the Cabinet decided in August to implement the
sixth pay commission from September last year, the armed
forces had raised the "anomalies" and sought a political
decision on it.

At one point, the services headquarters had in an
unprecedented move refused to implement the cabinet decision,
causing a lot of embarrassment to the government. The services
chief had time and again stated that the pay commission
"anomalies" were not about money but about status and command
and control issues.

Consequently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intervened
and set up the ministerial committee which had Defence
Minister A K Antony and Home Minister P Chidambaram as
members.

The committee had submitted its report to the PM in the
middle of December 2008. PTI NCB
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