The report on the pay structure, as revised by the committee headed by Cabinet Secretary Muhammad Musharraf Hossain Bhuiyan, was handed over a to Finance Minister AMA Muhith. The Pay Commission suggesting a maximum basic pay of Tk 80,000 and a minimum of Tk, 8,200 will be effective from July 1, the finance Minister said Wednesday after receiving the report.
Earlier, the Pay Commission headed by former governor of Bangladesh Bank Mohammed Farashuddin submitted the report on Dec 21.
The government formed the five-strong committee headed by Bhuiyan on Jan 1 to review the report of the Farashuddin commission.
The secretary-level review committee has proposed to make government pay structure in 20 grades as against 16 grades proposed by the Pay Commission.
Finance Minister Muhith agreed with the secretary-level panel. “I think it should not be touched again,” he said.
Once the new structure is implemented, salaries of around 1.3 million public servants will rise by 87 to 101 percent.
The finance minister said the new structure would not cause price escalation in the commodity market. He said everyone’s salary should be ‘automatically’ increased every year and this was proposed in the report by the panel. Cabinet Secretary Bhuiyan also assured that there was no possibility of any impact of the report on the market at this stage as there had been no impacts when the Pay Commission had first submitted the report.
After getting the report, the finance minister said there would be 63.7 percent rise in government’s salary expenditure to implement the new structure.
However, he said, government had requisite fund to implement it.
Once the secretary-level committee’s proposed structure is implemented, the basic salary of first class officers recruited through BCS examinations will be over Tk. 25,000. In the current structure, they get Tk 11,000 in basic pay. Salary of government officials was last raised in 2009.
They also got 20 percent dearness allowance of their basic salary from Jul 1, 2013. The allowance will be discarded once the new structure is implemented.
Source: Weekly Holiday