seventh Pay Commission: The Union authorities on Saturday clarified that it has not issued any discover relating to the resumption of dearness allowance (DA) for central authorities workers and pensioners from subsequent month. The Union ministry of finance stated the ‘Office Memorandum on Dearness Relief to Central government employees doing rounds on media is ‘fake’. “A doc is doing rounds on social media claiming resumption of DA to Central Government workers and Dearness Relief to Central Government pensioners from July 2021. This OM is pretend and no such OM has been issued by GOI,” ministry of finance wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
Dearness Allowance (DA) is a component of salary of government employees and pensioners, aimed at soothing the impact of inflation. To cope up with the increasing inflation rates, the effective salary of government employees is revised periodically. As DA is related to cost of living, it varies from employee to employee based on whether they work in urban sector, semi-urban sector or the rural sector.
DA has been included to compensate for price rise or inflation in a particular financial year since 1996. It is revised twice every year – in January and July. In 2006, the Union government changed the formula to calculate the dearness allowance for central government employees and pensioners. The DA is calculated as per the following formula, as mentioned by ClearTax
For the central government employees:
Dearness Allowance % = ((Average of All-India Consumer Price Index (Base Year 2001=100) for the past 12 months -115.76)/115.76)*100
For Central public sector employees:
Dearness Allowance % = ((Average of All-India Consumer Price Index (Base Year 2001=100) for the past 3 months -126.33)/126.33)*100
At present, the central government pays its employees a dearness allowance of 17 per cent, which has been effective from July 2019. In April last year, the central government put hike in dearness allowance on hold in the wake of coronavirus outbreak. The ministry also stated that no arrears will be paid from January 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021. However, any hike in DA due to revision on July 1, 2021, will take into account the previous hikes as well, the central government said. The dearness allowance of the central government employees was raised by 4 per cent in January 2020, by 3 per cent in June 2020 and by 4 per cent in January this year, according to the Hindustan Times. DA is fully taxable for salaried employees.
Read all of the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News right here
