CoSAAP hails DA/DR hike

Staff REPORTER

ITANAGAR, Nov 24: The Confederation of Service Associations of Arunachal Pradesh (CoSAAP) has heartily welcomed Chief Minister Pema Khandu’s announcement to hike DA/DR by 4% for regular state government employees and pensioners, and to grant house rent allowance (HRA) to those employees without Govt accommodation facility and non-practicing allowance (NPA) to doctors as per 7th Pay Commission (Revised Pay) Rules, 2016.

“It is a joyful moment for all of us, the state government employees. The government has finally agreed to our demands. For this, I, on behalf of our 70-80,000 government employees, thank the state government,” CoSAAP president Likha Tech said while addressing a press conference here today.

At the same time, he gave a clarion call to all the state government employees to perform their duties sincerely. “The state government is fulfilling all our grievances. The way we claim our rights, we should also remember our share of duties. Because like the Constitution has given us our rights, simultaneously it has also given us our duties. We shouldn’t just claim our rights and not perform our duty. It is our basic duty to perform whatever our duty is,” he said.

Tech pointed out that there are some employees who are not sincere with their duties. Appealing to those employees to be sincere with their assigned duty, he urged the concerned HoDs to identify such employees and take action. “We need to change our work culture. If we do that we will work for our state, and then the state will grow and be healthy,” he added.

The CoSAAP president informed that it would soon conduct a district-wise survey on the work culture of the state government employees.

Appreciating the decision to cancel all out of turn promotions, he urged the departments which still haven’t implemented the order to do it with immediate effect.

CoSAAP, meanwhile, appealed to the state government to immediately complete the ongoing process of appointing APCS (EG) through lateral entry system and restoration of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) citing that states like Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Punjab have scraped New Pension Scheme (NPS) and restored OPS.