In a major New Year bonanza for the armed forces, the Prime Minister's Office has informed the defence ministry that the armed forces personnel would henceforth have a separate Pay Commission, which is delinked from the civilian Pay Panel.
In a communication to the defence ministry the PMO also granted the demand for placing 12,000 odd Lieutenant Colonels and equivalents in Navy and Air Force in the pay band four of the Sixth Central Pay Commission.
However, the PMO, which considered the recommendations of the ministerial committee headed by External Affairs Minister
Pranab Mukherjee, which said that the pay band four status with a grade pay of Rs 8000 would be accorded to Lieutenant Colonels who were performing a combat role or were ready for combat.
The Lieutenant Colonels on deputation to other services would receive the pay band four status only when they return to their parent service.
Another demand accepted by the PMO concerned the jawans, for whom the government would restore the 70 per cent pensionary weightage.
Till the government implements the Sixth Pay Commission's recommendations for allowing retired armed forces personnel's lateral entry into paramilitary and central police forces, the 70 per cent weightage would continue.
The present PMO communication, sent to the defence ministry in the last week of December, however, is silent on the two other core demands of the armed forces: placing the Lieutenant Generals in the higher administrative grade plus pay scales and bringing grade pay of officers from Captains to Brigadiers on par with their civilian counterparts.
But, conceding to the defence personnel's demand the PMO said it would set up a high powered committee to review the command and control functions, and the status of the armed forces vis-a-vis that of their civilian and paramilitary counterparts.
Though the defence ministry assumed that the PMO's communication is a fiat to the armed forces, the nitty-gritty of implementing them would have to be worked out in concert with the service headquarters, officials said.
After the Cabinet decided in August to implement the Sixth Pay Commission from September last year, the armed forces had raised the "anomalies" and sought a political decision on it.
At one point, the services headquarters had in an unprecedented move refused to implement the cabinet decision, causing a lot of embarrassment to the government. The services chief had time and again stated that the Pay Commission "anomalies" were not about money but about status and command and control issues.
Consequently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intervened and set up the ministerial committee which had Defence Minister A K Antony and and the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram as members. The committee had submitted its report to the PM in the middle of December 2008.