Dar pledges a 150% executive salary allowance.
An allowance will have a Rs1.3 billion impact.
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Secretariat’s personnel have been subject to financial discrimination, but on Wednesday, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar vowed to put an end to it. The finance minister committed to pay a 150% executive allowance within a week as new information revealed that the annual impact of redressing the wrong would be Rs1.3 billion.
Following Dar’s commitment, the officers from the Economist Group, Technical Group, and Information Service Group terminated their 13-day pen-down strike until December 14, when the finance minister vowed that all officials in the Pak-Secretariat, ranging in grade from 17 to 22, would be treated similarly.
On Wednesday, Dar met with a delegation made up of protestor representatives in his office. A meeting participant told The Express Tribune that after speaking with the delegates, the finance minister acknowledged that there was discrimination in the executive allowance decision but added that it had been made before he joined office.
“The executive allowance will be granted to the officers working in the Federal Secretariat, President Secretariat, PM’s Office, and ICT field administration in BPS-17 to BPS-22 at 1.5 times of basic pay with effect from July 1, 2022,” read the cabinet decision. “The allowance will be granted to the officers working in the Federal Secretariat, President Secretariat, PM’s Office, and ICT field administration in BPS-17 to BPS-22.”
To the detriment of other service groups, the finance ministry nevertheless released a notification that was specifically designed to benefit two of them.
The seamless operation of the planning ministry and the transmission of crucial information to the International Monetary Fund were both negatively impacted by the three service groups monitoring the pen-down strike (IMF).
The absence of the technical and economist groups from a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) embarrassed the Planning Ministry because they left documentation unfilled.
Due to unfinished documentation, the ECNEC was forced to postpone the final approval of two World Bank-funded projects: the $1 billion Flood Response Emergency Housing Project (financed with a $500 million loan from the World Bank) and the $255 million Sindh Integrated Health and Population Project.
The finance minister first believed that just 15% of eligible officials were receiving an executive allowance and that providing it to all officers working for the Pakistan Secretariat would incur enormous financial costs. The federal bureaucracy is located in the Pak Secretariat.
However, the delegation informed Dar that there were roughly 600 disadvantaged officers out of 1700 officers and that the cost of equal treatment would be Rs1.3 billion annually. According to the officers of the economist group, up to 1,100 cops were receiving the executive allowance.
However, according to the Finance Ministry’s regulation division, around half of all officials were already receiving the executive allowance, which had a financial impact of Rs1 billion.
“Our perception from the conversation was that the finance minister may cut the total benefit to a proportion where either the impact of accommodating the leftover officers will be neutral or little to treat all the officers equally,” said another meeting participant.
Two officers from the information group working next to Dar’s office were denied the stipend despite frequently working more than 12 hours and even on weekends, which provides evidence of prejudice. The allowance, however, was available to officials from the other service groups seated next to the director general’s media office.
Similar to this, in the planning commission, executive authority over the development budget and economic decision-making was used by everyone from the position of section officer to the federal secretary, but officers serving as research assistants to the joint chief economist were not given executive authority.
The delegation also informed the finance minister that they were prepared to give up their demand for a pay raise in the upcoming budget in the event that they received the 150% executive allowance or were treated equally with the other blue-eyed officers.
From grade 17 to grade 21, 197 officers from the technical and economic groups are employed in various ministries. Giving them a 150% executive allowance will have a net effect of about Rs190 million per year.
