Civic body to pay Rs 3,700cr as 7th Pay Commission arrears

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will bear Rs 3,700 crore towards arrears of the Seventh Pay Commission for its employees. This amount will be spent from the civic body reserve funds.

“The civic body will bear an additional load towards employees’ salaries now onwards as the seventh pay commission is implemented. Till now, the BMC has spent Rs 10,000 crore towards employees’ salaries and from next year, it will spend Rs 12,000 crore,” said municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta in his final budget speech Saturday.

The BMC has 2.02 lakh employees, including pensioners. The civic house  on Saturday passed the budget of 2019-20 amounting to rs 30,696 crore. In its budget, the BMC allotted Rs 1200 crore towards the implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission.

After the employees’ unions met the commissioner in February regarding implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission, the BMC announced that the interim 20 per cent of arrears are likely to be credited in the March salaries. This goes to additional payment ranging from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 3 lakh depending upon the grade. The total arrears are of 37 months.

However, to manage the additional burden on the civic body, Mehta said, “BMC intends for administrative reforms to curtail establishment expenditure by managing duti-es and duty hours of staff and rationalising deployment”.

The civic body has also announced levying service charges and entry fees for various services.

The state government has announced impleme-ntation of the Seventh Pay Commission and aft-er this, the BMC announced that the civic employees will also be benefitted.

The decision to implement the Seventh Pay Commission comes ahead of Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections to be held this year.