The retirement age for university teachers(University Grants Commission - UGC) is raised from 60 to 62 years.

University and college teachers in Karnataka will get revised University Grants Commission (UGC) pay scales. The retirement age for university teachers is raised from 60 to 62 years.

The pay revision along the lines of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations will benefit an estimated 18,630 university and college teachers. The beneficiaries of the retirement age enhancement will, however, be much less.

Announcing the Cabinet decisions, Home Minister V S Acharya said the revised pay scales for teachers would be implemented with retrospective effect from January 1, 2006.

The hike for teachers will range between Rs 10,000 and Rs 35,000 per month depending on the seniority and the positions they hold. The Cabinet also met the long-pending demands of junior doctors, who had threatened to go on indefinite strike.

Nearly 4,000 doctors are employed with the health department. The Cabinet approved allowances between Rs 4,000 and Rs 12,500 a month for the government doctors.

The hike for doctors (ranging between Rs 3,000 and Rs 8,000 per month) would be with immediate effect. The decision to hike the pay scale of university/college teachers is in line with the UGC-constituted Chaddha Committee recommendation.

The Chaddha committee had recommendations implementation of the revised UGC scales for college teachers. According to education department sources, a total of 18,630 lecturers, including 6,740 faculty members in government colleges, 9,650 in private aided colleges and 2,360 in university colleges, will benefit from the decision.

The teachers’ wage bill for the government will shoot up from the present Rs 590 crore to Rs 815 crore per annum, sources added. The Centre will bear 80 per cent of the revised salary bill from January 1, 2006 to March 2010. Later on, the State Government will have to foot the entire bill.

Acharya said the arrears of Rs 954 crore would have to be paid as the difference for a period of 51 months from January 1, 2006, to March 31, 2010. The Union Government will bear 80 per cent (Rs 763 crore) of the salary bill, and the remaining 20 per cent (Rs 191 crore) will be borne by the State Government from January 1, 2006, to March 2010. The date of release of the first instalment of arrears as well as the revised salary will be announced later.

Designation changes

There will be a change in designations following the implementation of the revised pay scales. The posts of lecturer, senior lecturer or selection grade lecturer will go, and instead there will be assistant professor, associate professor and a professor.

The fixation formula, allowances, yardsticks for career advancement scheme, qualification criteria and leave facilities will be as stipulated by the UGC.

However, sources said the government had decided not to create new posts. This is in line with a Finance Department proposal. Besides, leave and medical reimbursement facilities and pensionary benefits will continue to be applicable to State Government employees.

Moreover, teaching staff without UGC-prescribed qualifications are not entitled to avail the revised scheme, the sources added. The Federation of University and College Teachers’ Association in Karnataka (Fuctak) welcomed the decision to implement the revised scales of pay from January 1, 2006.

The government approval for hiking doctors’ allowances will entail an additional burden of about Rs 35 crore. For the current year it is about Rs 17.5 crore, according to health department sources. The cabinet also decided to regularise the services of 462 doctors and 107 dentists presently on contract.

Their services will be regularised as and when they complete three years of service. The Karnataka Government Medical Officers’ Association (KGMOA), however, expressed its displeasure at the new scales. KGMOA secretary Dr G A Srinivasa said: “The hike in allowances does not meet our expectations and demands.

Only one demand on contract-based doctors has been fulfilled. We will go ahead with mass resignation on September 29.” Another KGMOA member said diploma and PG students were given different allowances, even though the work done by them were the same. “This difference has been created by the government”, said the member.
Source: Decaan Herald

Raising retirement to 62

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is keen on extending the retirement age of civil servants to 62, one of his aides told this columnist in Delhi recently. He had apparently been keen to do so earlier this year, but such a change was thought politically risky at a time when the Congress party was using Rahul Gandhi’s youth as its electoral strategy (how do you convince voters that the party is going to harness the energy of the youth if you propose to keep all the old babus for another two years?). It may seem unreal now, but back then many in government feared that the Congress might lose power (even national security advisor M K Narayanan apparently threw a farewell party!), so the PM’s plan was shelved. It is being revived again, with the PM himself taking great interest.

This proposal has two justifications. First and foremost is fiscal. As had happened when the retirement age was raised from 58 to 60 in 1998, the expenditure on pensions would be curbed. In this year’s budget, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee earmarked non-Plan expenditure for pensions at Rs 25,085.49 crore. That is a growth of almost 40 per cent (39.4 per cent). It is a major contributor to the total spending that was announced by Pranab, a little over Rs 10 trillion, a hike of around 36 per cent from last year.Of course, coming at the time of a global economic slowdown this massive expenditure is possibly a good risk to take; but the prime minister is obviously looking for ways to keep costs from running away.

Of course, worse than the central finances are those of many of the States; their governments are far more reckless than the Centre’s. In the decade after New Delhi raised the age of superannuation to 60, the States slowly but surely followed suit. The States would likely follow the Centre’s lead again and that would help them manage their fiscal problems.

The other reason the PM wants to push retirement back another two years is that he wants to make tap the valuable human resource that bureaucrats represent. For one thing, life expectancy in India has gone up. According to UNICEF, in 2007 it was 64 years, and this is a figure that the average bureaucrat would have pulled upwards. Thus, when a civil servant retires at 60, she or he is still at their mental peak, and each acts as an institutional storehouse of government policy and programme implementation. Retaining them for another two years would possibly enrich functioning of the government. At the very least, it would keep some of the hypocrites off the boob tube — it’s very bizarre that the same bureaucrats who set government policy for 30 years or so, start abusing the government at the nearest TV station studio the moment they find themselves jobless. (Maybe it’s their pique at not getting a post-retirement sinecure).

The PM is not the first person to have such a brainwave. Almost a year ago, the University Grants Commission appointed a committee under G K Chadha to study pay revision, and he made a suggestion that teachers’ retirement age be raised to 65. This is timely advice considering that India is currently set to expand education in a major way under the stewardship of the dynamic Kapil Sibal. It is not just a matter of filling the ranks of teachers, but imparting quality teaching to India’s children.

If the PM wants to extend the retirement age then he would only be following a global trend. The retirement age in the US is 65; in Japan it is 60 and the government is gradually raising it to 65 by 2013, but people anyway continue working till 65 on reduced wages. By 2033, Austria’s retirement age will be 65. In Denmark it will be 67 years by 2027. Hungary plans to make it 69 years by 2050. Israel is already raising it to 67 years for men. All these countries and many others are increasing the retirement age because of an increasingly alarming problem — their ageing populations. By 2020, a quarter of Japan’s population will be 65 and over. Life expectancy in the US is about 77, and by 2050 is expected to go up to 83. Japan’s is already 82.4 years. Indeed, the life expectancy in some of the advanced countries, according to 2009 OECD data, are: France 80.9 years, Canada 80.4 years, Sweden 80.8 years, Italy 80.9 years and Spain 81.1 years. You would have to think that as India gets wealthier — which it undoubtedly is — our population’s life expectancy will similarly increase.

Imagine a person retiring at 60, but living till at least 80 (if not more), perhaps physically weakened as she or he passes 75, but still mentally at the top of his or her game. What do they do with such a long retirement? And besides the fact that the increase in life expectancy leaves retirees with too much time on their hands and their skills unutilised, it also places a great burden on the working population, which has to finance the social security and health benefits that the elderly need. In the West it costs much more to maintain an elderly person than it does to raise a child; and health care costs in the rich world are projected to be those countries’ biggest finance headache (much more than the costs of the stimulus to end the current economic crisis). Thus it is not surprising that there are an increasing number of voices in the West and Japan who are talking of increasing the retirement age to 75. Doing so would engage the older citizens, contribute to the state exchequer in terms of taxes from older workers, and reduce the social security burden on the young. It is a surprisingly obvious solution.

With the PM politically on the defensive after the all-round criticism of his joint statement with his Pakistani counterpart at Sharm-el-Sheikh, it is unclear when he may undertake the change in retirement age, though he is said to be very enthusiastic about it. Sharm-el-Sheikh will pass however; party boss Sonia Gandhi can manage the naysayers in the Congress, and the BJP is still shell-shocked from its electoral defeat to do serious damage to the government. And even within the BJP it is thought that currently the coming assembly elections in Maharashtra favour the Congress. Manmohan Singh will soon enough have the political wind at his back to make this proposal. Good thing, for it is an eminently sensible one.
Source: Express buzz
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