तेलंगाना में वेतन-पेंशन चार गुना होकर 6,000 करोड़, IAS अधिकारी से अधिक वेतन

Telangana's monthly salary and pension bill has surged four-fold in a decade to around Rs 6,000 crore, with chief engineers of power utilities drawing up to Rs 7 lakh and senior Class 4 employees like sweepers earning around Rs 2 lakh, chief secretary K Ramakrishna Rao revealed on Wednesday. Rao, addressing a conference on the recommendations of 16th Finance Commission - organised by the Centre for Economic and Social Studies - said the outgo was Rs 1,500 crore when Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. Since then, salary and pension expenditure has expanded 300% due to successive pay revisions coinciding with election cycles significantly driving up fixed expenditure, he said. A striking consequence of these revisions is that public-sector salaries now far exceed that of IAS officers and even the governor. The chief secretary said that salaries in the power utilities were comparatively high because of a revision once every four years. While entry-level municipal staff earn approximately Rs 28,000 a month, drivers or sanitation workers with 30 years of service can get in excess of Rs 1 lakh, sources said. In the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, 2% of sanitation workers are regularised, making them eligible for Rs 70,000 a month plus benefits on average. Salary revisions are determined through govt-appointed pay revision commissions, where a "fitment" percentage is applied. This represents the increase granted on the combined basic pay and dearness allowance, effectively raising overall salaries across employee categories, sources said. The chief secretary said high salaries had intensified competition for govt jobs, with about 799 candidates vying for each of the 563 Group-1 posts advertised recently. Candidates across categories prepare for selection for years, fuelling a booming coaching industry. Telangana has managed to sustain the expenditure through strong economic performance, recording roughly 11% growth and a steady increase in revenue sources, Rao said. "We have created robust digital infrastructure for subsidies. We distributed Rs 7,000 crore under Rythu Bandhu, with only a 6% error rate in this process," he said. In the first 10 years since the formation of Telangana, the state incurred a total expenditure of about Rs 15 lakh crore, of which nearly Rs 12 lakh crore went towards salaries, pensions and debt repayment, and around Rs 3 lakh crore towards capital expenditure. Only about Rs 15,000 crore was generated through asset sales.