Raise in government servants’ salaries, allowances notified

LAHORE: The provincial government on Thursday notified a 50 per cent increase in the salaries and medical allowance of its employees applicable from July 1.

According the Finance Department notification, all civil employees of the provincial government will be paid an ad hoc allowance amounting to 50 per cent of the ‘existing basic pay’ in 2008. The enhancement will also apply to the contingent-paid staff as well as contract employees in civil posts.

The new allowance will be subject to income tax and admissible during leave including the entire period of leave preparatory to retirement. It will, however, not be paid during extraordinary leave. It will also be inadmissible during an employee’s posting or deputation abroad. On their repatriation from posting or deputation abroad, it would be admissible at the rate at which it would have been admissible had they not been posted abroad.

For the purpose of calculation of pension/gratuity and recovery of house rent, it will not be treated as part of ‘emoluments’.

The allowance will not be admissible to the personnel of Punjab Police, the Border Military Police in DG Khan and Rajanpur, the Baloch Levy, the Prisons Department, the Directorate of Reclamation and Probation and the judiciary. Employees of other departments that have already been allowed an allowance equal to at least one month’s initial salary in their pay scales will also not get the allowance. This includes the staff of teaching institutions, the Directorate of Special Education and the Management and Professional Development Department. The medical allowance in lieu of outdoor treatment and reimbursement of medical expenses has been doubled for officials in BS-1 to BS-16 and raised to 15 per cent of basic pay for those in BS-16 to BS-22.

Local purchase of medicines and reimbursement of amounts spent on purchase of medicine will be discontinued for outdoor patients except for insulin-dependent diabetes, cancer, and hepatitis-B and -C. Reimbursement of all kinds of expenditure on account of indoor treatment will continue.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16^th, 2010.