DA hike: Will basic pay of central govt employees, pensioners increase as DA, DR touch 50%, as per the 7th Pay Commission?
dearness allowance (DA) touches 50%, several other allowances of the central government employees have been increased in the last few months. Now there have been media reports that the basic pay of the central government employees and pensioners will also increase during the next hike of dearness allowance or dearness relief (DR). Usually, the DA and DR of the central government employees and pensioners increase from July. With DA and DR touching the 50% threshold, there have been speculations that DA and DR will be automatically merged into basic pay and raise the basic of the thousands of central government employees and pensioners. Are central government employees and pensioners looking for a hike in basic pay from July 2024? Read here to find out.
DA, DR merger into basic pay: What the 5th Pay Commission and the 6th Central Pay Commission say
The speculation started as there had been an earlier instance of DA merging into basic pay after crossing the threshold of 50%. Arjun Paleri, Partner, BTG Advaya, a law firm, says, «The Fifth Pay Commission Report (para 105.11) made a recommendation for merging the DA with the basic salary and terming such merger as dearness pay. Following this recommendation, in 2004, DA amounting to 50% of the basic pay was merged to create dearness pay for the purpose of calculating allowances and retirement benefits.»
«However, no such merger was advocated for by the Sixth Pay Commission. Instead, it introduced a concept of delinking pay revisions from a fixed 10-year cycle, tying them to the DA/DR crossing the 50%-mark,» says Sanjeev Kumar, Partner, Luthra and Luthra Law Offices India. «This approach has been consistently upheld by the last Central Pay Commission, emphasizing that future
