Govt nurses paid 3.5 times private ones, drivers double: IIM-A

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/govt-nurses-paid-3-5-times-private-ones-drivers-double-iim-a/172510/

Finance minister Arun Jaitley was only stating the obvious when he said recently that the Pay Commission-mandated higher pay for government staff and the one-rank-one-pension (OROP) scheme would come at the cost of the Centre's ambitious social development projects.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley was only stating the obvious when he said recently that the Pay Commission-mandated higher pay for government staff and the one-rank-one-pension (OROP) scheme would come at the cost of the Centre’s ambitious social development projects.

It pays to be in the government, literally. Across several job roles, ranging from drivers, gardeners, plumbers and storekeepers to scientists, engineers, doctors and software developers, government/PSU salaries are significantly higher than comparable packages for private-sector employees and more so at the entry and middle levels, according to a recent IIM-A study.

While the myth of government employees being worse off than their handsomely compensated private-sector peers might have already been exploded, the latest study commissioned by the Seventh Central Pay Commission has really turned the tables on the well-heeled government staff.

The last two pay commissions — especially the 6th panel that hiked salaries of government staff by a hefty 40% — and the generous dearness allowances given to government/PSU employees in recent years have led the IIM-A researchers to conclude that in many of the roles, “the government is paying higher salaries compared to the private sector, particularly in initial years for jobs at the lower levels of skill requirement and hierarchy”. And in some cases, the disparity is starker — for instance, an entry-level nurse (with up to five years’ experience) gets Rs 58,000-67,000 a month in the government while the comparable private-sector salary is Rs 13,000-28,000. Even in the case of highly skilled jobs, the government/PSU sector is often better paymaster than private firms — an engineer with the railways, for example, is paid Rs 52,000-61,700 in the initial five years of her career and one with a Maharatna PSU up to Rs 1 lakh, compared with Rs 33,000-52,000 offered to a private-sector engineer.