Senior K-P bureaucrats get executive allowances

Employees in BPS-17 to 21 to get allowances which are 1.5 times their initial basic pay

PESHAWAR: As part of its plan to upgrade and regularize services of government employees in different cadres, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government on Thursday decided to win over the provincial bureaucracy by approving “schedule posts allowance” for them.

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) cabinet met at the civil secretariat on Thursday with Chief Minister Pervez Khattak in the chair. It approved the executive allowance, later renamed as the schedule posts allowance. Officers of the Provincial Management Services (PMS), Provincial Civil Services (PCS) and the Pakistan Administrative Services (PAS) groups working the province will benefit from the allowance.

The cabinet also approved hefty amounts as monthly allowances for the chief secretary and the inspector general of K-P police in the meeting.

Officials close to the developments said that the allowance would be extended to 801 government officers working in the province in different grades.

On Thursday, a summary comprising three options for the allowance was placed before the cabinet. The first option suggested granting allowances which were 250 per cent the employee’s initial basic pay for employees in basic pay scale -17 to 21.

The second option called for allowances which were twice the initial basic pay. The third option called for allowances which were only 1.5 times the initial basic pay.

The cabinet approved the third option for the schedule posts allowance.

Based on the basic pay for 2016, allowances for a BPS-17 officer will amount to roughly Rs38,000 per month. For BPS-18, it will amount to Rs47,835. For BPS-19 officers, it will be Rs74,055, for BPS-20 it will be Rs86,115 and for BPS-21, the allowance will be Rs95,670.  The allowance will be paid to the officers along with their routine salaries and is expected to put a dent of Rs462.7 million in the provincial government annual kitty.

The move comes weeks after the K-P government upgraded 75,722 employees in various pay scales apart from regularizing 4,743 contract employees working on 53 projects.

Move welcomed

The PMS Officers Association, in a statement issued on Thursday, welcomed the move and thanked the chief minister, cabinet, chief secretary and secretary finance for fulfilling their longstanding demand of the allowance.

Hajj assistants

The cabinet on Thursday also approved the procedure for selecting Moaveneen Hujjaj (Pilgrim Assistants during Hajj) amongst government employees of different grades.  Under the new procedure, 14 slots for the pilgrim assistants will be filled through quota system in which 35 per cent of the quota will be reserved for the minister for religious affairs, 35 per cent for the establishment secretary and the remaining 30 per cent for Auqaf secretary. Moreover, only those government employees qualify for the service who have completed at least five years of service.

The cabinet also approved a summary for the using of 10 per cent of the oil and gas royalty for the districts where these natural resources are produced.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2018.