7th pay commission: This may be booster shot central government employees are waiting for, but there's a catch

7th pay commission: Price rise has been playing spoilsport with the Indian economy and also hurting the chances of central government employees getting a salary hike as per their demands. The staff wants a 3.68 times fitment factor hike that will power up the salaries at the lowest level to Rs 26,000 and boost the pay all the way up the hierarchical bureaucratic structure. However, the positive aspects that need to be noted is that the overall economy is growing by leaps and bounds and that will definitely fatten up the government's treasury and lead to more funds being available for distribution and that may well include raising salaries of central government employees on whom is the task of ensuring that the NDA government's policies are implemented efficiently and quickly. 

The BJP came to power due to their promise to spur development of Indian economy in the first place. The latest news about the state of the economy that was revealed by NITI Aayog, said that GDP growth is expected to rise to a whopping over 8 percent in 2019 from the excellent 7.7 percent in the March quarter.

While a galloping economy is great news, there is catch involved that raises a big question about what is going to happen to 7th pay commission based demands for hike over and above the amount recommended by the 7th CPC report. The problem is that this may well push the order for a pay hike by the government to next year! Needless to say, central government employees have put their faith on the reassurances that various Union ministers have given to consider their demands favourably. Even Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is currently recovering from surgery, the FM post has been given for the interim period to  Union minister Piyush Goyal, had promised that Centre would look favourably for the best possible solution on this.

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Significantly, since then a number of state government employees, teachers and others have received good news on 7th pay commission. Notably, Gramin Dak Sevaks had gone on a long strike that brought the Postal Dept to a halt and this had led to Centre agreeing to their demands to remove 7th pay commission anomalies that had cropped up leaving their salaries at the previous low levels. Railways unions, teachers organisations and some others too have resorted to protests to highlight their demands.