By IANS
New Delhi : The Indian government has agreed to merge the industrial dearness allowance (IDA) of executives and supervisors of profit-earning central public sector enterprises (CPSE) with their basic pay, with retrospective effect from Jan 1, 2007.
For a similar merger for unionised workers, the government has left the decision to the discretion of the respective boards of these companies who “may implement it after negotiations with the respective unions”.
“The proposal was approved by the union cabinet presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,” said Information and Broadcasting Minister Priyaranajn Dasmunsi Wednesday soon after the meeting.
He said the cabinet has agreed to merge a portion of the IDA that is equal to 50 percent of the existing basic pay of CPSE employees for board level and below-board level executives and non-unionised supervisors with their basic pay effective from Jan 1, 2007.
He, however, added that this measure would be restricted to only profit-earning CPSEs.
“The merger of the IDA with basic pay will be shown as Dearness Pay (DP), which would be counted for payment of other allowances, transfer grant, retirement benefits, contribution to Contributory Provident Fund, and various other advances,” said the minister.
The minister also announced that “no budgetary support would be provided for this purpose”.
“But the leave travel concessions (LTC), travel allowance (TA) and dearness allowance (DA) while on tour and transfer will still be calculated on the basic pay alone without taking into account this Dearness Pay,” he said.