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Monday, Jun 26, 2006

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National

Defence officers want pay anomaly corrected

Sandeep Dikshit

NEW DELHI: The Lt. Governor of Pondicherry, Gen. M. M. Lakhera, has sought Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee's intervention to correct a 20-year-old Pay Commission anomaly that affects over 25,000 defence officers, most of whom have retired.

In a letter to Mr. Mukherjee, Gen. Lakhera said he had persuaded the officers not to approach the court for redress and requested the Minister to give them their due "in the larger interest of the Government."

The former officers have been contacting each other by e-mail initiated by Brig (Retd.) O. P. Marwah, Chairman of the largest welfare organisation of former defence officers. It all started with a case filed by then Captain A. K. Dhanapalan who had contended that the pay for officers up to the rank of Brigadier had been wrongly fixed and was not in conformity with the recommendations of the Fourth Pay Commission. The officer's contention was upheld first by a single judge of the Kerala High Court and then by a two-member Bench of the same court. After 542 days, when the Government went for an appeal, the Supreme Court did not "find any justifiable explanation for the delay" and dismissed the special leave petition.

The impact of the one-time payment to these officers would be Rs. 120 crore with no perpetuating effect, according to Gen. (Retd.) Surjit Singh, Chairman of the Army's Fourth Pay Commission cell. The payout would vary between Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 70,000 in extreme cases. A meeting of former officers in NOIDA has decided that no officer would claim interest on 20-year-old arrears. "Many of the officers are too old to claim the money and some have died. So, the payout would be for a maximum of 22,000 officers," estimates Gen. Singh.

The seeds for the anomaly were sown after the Fourth Pay Commission recommended "rank pay" in addition to the new payscales for officers up to the rank of Brigadier. But the bureaucracy deducted the rank pay, fixed the new scales and then added the rank pay. Brigadiers were not affected at all while Colonels lost one increment. Lt. Colonels too did not have much to complain about. He said there is a lesson from this mistake for the proposed Sixth Pay Commission. "Unless this new panel has enough military component, this may happen again. I remember that if ever we went to call on the office of the Pay Commission, they looked upon us as if we had broken the rules. The decision makers should realise that only the wearer can tell where the shoe pinches and the ethos of military service can only be understood by those who have donned the uniform," he said.

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