Central Govt Employees, Pensioners Will Have to Wait Longer, Meeting Delayed to Discuss 7th Pay Panel Proposals

New Delhi:

7th Pay Commission Proposal Implementation: Employees and pensioners will now have to wait a bit longer for their increased dearness allowance (DA) and dearness relief (DR) to reach their accounts as the meeting that was supposed to discuss the hike in DA and DR have been postponed due to COVID. The central government had announced in March that the dearness allowance (DA) of central employees and dearness relief (DR) for pensioners would be resumed from July 1, 2021.

The meeting of the National Council of JCM, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) and the Ministry of Finance (Department of Expenditure) officials were finally going to resolve the 7th Central Pay Commission matrix issue that has been delaying the implementation of full benefits.

The meeting is expected to be held in the last week of May. Earlier, Anurag Singh Thakur, Minister of State (MoS) for Finance, had said that the three instalments of dearness allowance will start to be paid from July 1, 2021.

In a written reply in the Upper House of Parliament regarding the payment of DA, Thakur had stated that the three pending DA instalments of the Central Government servants will be 'subsumed' and the revised DA rates will become effective from 1st July 2021.

The announcement made by Thakur came as a big relief to 52 lakh central government employees as the Centre has frozen the DA benefit of employees till June 2021.

The decision to restore DA from July 2021 would benefit about 50 lakh central government employees and more than 65 lakh pensioners. Employees would not get any arrears on non-revision of DA for the previous period.

There has been no update on three pending DA instalments from January 1, 2020, July 1, 2020, and January 1, 2021, so far. The meeting would have finally resolved this issue for central government servants (CGS) or employees, at once. The three instalments of DA were frozen in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Thakur said, "As and when the decision to release the future instalments of Dearness Allowance due from 01.07.2021 is taken, the rates of DA as effective from 01.01.2020, 01.07.2020 and 01.01. 2021 will be restored prospectively and will be subsumed in the cumulative revised rates effective from 01.07.2021."

Currently, central employees and pensioners are getting a 17% dearness allowance which may now jump to 28% leading to a huge rise in the employees' 7th CPC salary.

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