The Central Pay Commission (Part II)
By Lokanath Mishra
Chief Adviser, All India Pensioners Association of CBIC and the All India CGHS Beneficiaries Association of CBIC
How the Perception — and Reality — of Pay Commissions Favouring the IAS and Elite Services Evolved
The perception that successive Central Pay Commissions have favoured the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and a few elite Group-A services is not simply an emotional grievance of the wider civil service — it is a pattern supported by administrative evidence, institutional design, and historical precedent. Over time, this perception has hardened into reality.
Origins of Structural Bias: Institutional Design and Representation
Since the First Pay Commission (1946–47), IAS officers have held pivotal roles in the Commission’s structure — as secretaries, members, advisors, or key drafters of background papers. Their proximity to both the political executive and the Cabinet Secretariat ensured that their viewpoint dominated the framing of pay structures and parity norms.
Successive Commissions — from the Third (1973) through the Seventh (2016) — relied heavily on internal administrative comparisons rather than independent job evaluation systems. The Fifth Central Pay Commission (1997), for example, observed that “the relative importance of posts should be judged primarily by their role in the governmental hierarchy,” a principle that effectively preserved the IAS benchmark as the apex model.
Other Central Services and employee federations rarely enjoyed comparable representation. As a result, decisions on promotion pathways, parity norms, and pension fixation were routinely filtered through an administrative elite lens.
In contrast, several democracies — notably the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada — have established independent pay review bodies where representation from unions, professional associations, and pensioners’ groups is statutorily ensured. Their models emphasize objective job evaluation, not cadre-based comparison, a practice India’s Pay Commissions have yet to institutionalize.
The NFFU and the Codification of Inequality
One of the most significant examples of preferential structural advantage was the introduction of Non-Functional Financial Upgradation (NFFU) under the Sixth CPC (2008), following the Cabinet decision of 29 August 2008.
Originally justified as a measure to reduce stagnation, NFFU guaranteed that IAS and other Group-A officers would automatically receive the next higher pay scale after a fixed period, regardless of actual vacancy or promotion. This mechanism effectively granted time-bound promotions in pay, leading to accelerated pension accrual and post-retirement benefits.
However, NFFU was never extended to the wider Central Government workforce — including technical, ministerial, or subordinate cadres. This selective extension not only widened pay and pension disparities but also violated the principle of equal opportunity in career progression, as recognized in Union of India v. S.K. Goel (2014) where the Supreme Court cautioned against arbitrary exclusion in service conditions.
The Seventh CPC (2016) acknowledged concerns about differential treatment but stopped short of recommending NFFU’s universal application, arguing that it was “a policy decision of the Government.” The result has been a dual-track career system, where officers of identical recruitment standards face markedly different financial trajectories.
Benchmarking and Downward Adjustment
Another embedded inequity lies in the selective benchmarking methodology adopted by Pay Commissions. Instead of comparing job profiles across services on objective functional criteria, Commissions often used the IAS or allied services as the “reference cadre” and adjusted others downward.
The Fifth and Sixth CPC reports explicitly compared functional equivalence only within select administrative groupings, not across the entire civil service spectrum. This created a cascading hierarchy: once a particular cadre was placed lower relative to the IAS in one Commission, that lower position became the baseline for the next, creating a self-perpetuating pay gap.
The National Council (JCM) and several employee federations — including those representing the Revenue, Defence, and Railway services — have repeatedly highlighted this distortion. Their memoranda to the Government of India (notably during 2014–15) warned that “functional equivalence has been replaced by historical precedence,” leading to structural inequality embedded in pay matrices.
Post-Retirement Continuity of Privilege
The imbalance extends beyond active service. Senior IAS and Group-A officers frequently continue to hold influential positions post-retirement — as members or chairpersons of commissions, tribunals, or regulatory authorities, or as officers on special duty (OSDs). Many receive re-employment or contractual extensions, allowing them to remain financially and institutionally privileged even after superannuation.
By contrast, officers from technical, revenue, and subordinate services rarely receive such appointments. This asymmetry perpetuates a cycle of influence: the same group that benefits from systemic advantages continues to shape the very policies — including Pay Commission implementation — that reinforce its own status.
A 2019 Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice noted this pattern, urging that post-retirement appointments “must be made transparent and merit-based to ensure balance across services.”
International Parallels and Lessons
Globally, pay-review frameworks in the UK (Senior Salaries Review Body), New Zealand (State Services Commission), and Singapore (Public Service Division) are independent of the administrative elite and guided by empirical workload assessments and public accountability mechanisms.
These systems maintain parity through statutory safeguards that prevent any single service from dominating the process. India’s Pay Commission framework, however, remains administratively driven, without external oversight or equal stakeholder participation.
The Case for Statutory Corrective Reform
The cumulative effect of seven Pay Commissions has been the institutionalization of inequality — a hierarchy in which service affiliation determines not only pay and promotion but also pension and post-retirement privilege.
To correct this imbalance, the forthcoming Eighth Central Pay Commission should:
1. Ensure statutory representation from all major Central Services, employee federations, and pensioners’ associations.
2. Adopt objective job evaluation tools and independent benchmarking across departments.
3. Extend time-bound promotion or upgradation mechanisms like NFFU to all services or replace them with a uniform time-scale progression system.
4. Establish an independent oversight body — similar to the UK’s Review Body on Senior Salaries — to review implementation and address anomalies.
5. Disclose all deliberations and adoption status publicly to ensure transparency and trust.
Conclusion
The Pay Commission framework, as it stands, has evolved into an instrument of institutional privilege rather than administrative parity. What began as a mechanism for rational and equitable compensation has, over time, entrenched structural hierarchies within India’s civil service.
To restore credibility, the 8th Pay Commission must move decisively from representation imbalance to representational justice, from selective privilege to systemic fairness, and from bureaucratic dominance to institutional equity.
Only then can the Pay Commission reclaim its legitimacy as a truly national body for all government employees and pensioners, not a selective reward mechanism for a few.
(To be continued — Part III: )