Centre To Hike Dearness Allowance By 2% From January 1

The Centre is likely to announce a hike of 2-4 percent in dearness allowance for its about 50 lakh employees and 58 lakh pensioners later this month.

Dearness allowance and dearness relief are provided to employees and pensioners to neutralise the impact of inflation on their earnings. The labour unions, however, are not happy with the proposed hike saying it would not be able to offset the real impact of price rise.

“The dearness allowance as per the agreed formula by the Centre works out to be 2 percent, which would be effected from January 1, 2017,” Confederation of Central Government Employees' President KKN Kutty told PTI.

However, Kutty expressed dissatisfaction over such a “meager” hike saying that the consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW), which is an agreed benchmark for increasing dearness allowance is far from reality.

He said that there is difference between the quantum of price rise of commodities ascertained by the Labour Bureau and the Ministry of Agriculture.

CPI-IW is an imaginary number due to poor quality of data collection by Labour Bureau and it is far from reality, he claimed.

The average CPI-IW to be taken into account for raising DA is 4.95 percent from January 1 to December 31, 2017. Since the government has already hiked the dearness allowance by 2 percent in October last year from July 1, 2016, it will now raise it further by 2 percent.

As per an agreed upon formula, the Centre hikes the allowance taking 12-month average of retail inflation. The government does not consider the price rise rate beyond a decimal point for deciding the rate of the dearness allowance.

Therefore, despite the fact that the hike works out to be 2.95 percent, the government will ignore the rate of price rise beyond decimal point and increase the DA by 2 percent.

The DA is paid as proportion of the basic pay of the central government employees.

Kutty said that the federation in the next meeting of the national council would make a case for considering the fractions while fixing DA.

The national council is an apex forum functioning under the Department of Personnel and Training where unionists and senior official discuss issues concerning central employees.

Earlier last year, the government hiked DA by 6 percent to 125 percent of basic pay. The DA was later merged into the basic pay following the implementation of the 7th Pay Commission award.

At present the Central government employees and pensioners are entitled to 2 percent dearness allowance, which was effected from July 1, 2016.