197. Daily Rules Recap - Treatment of special allowance for fixation of pay on promotion to the PO & RMS Accountant
• The Department of Posts (DOP), via its letter No. 02-17/2022-PAP dated February 7, 2023, informed that a proposal to treat Special Allowance at par with Special Pay under Rule 9(25) for Post Office (PO) & Railway Mail Service (RMS) Accountants is currently under consideration by the Department of Expenditure.
• As per this proposal, the cutoff date of April 22, 1998, would be removed, making the benefit applicable to all similarly placed employees until December 31, 2015. The Department sought financial implications from all circles regarding this proposal.
• According to this proposal, if a PO & RMS Accountant has been drawing Special Allowance continuously for three years, that amount would be considered for pay fixation under TBOP/MACP.
• The fate of this broader proposal is yet to be known. In the interim, the Directorate, through its letter No. 02-04/2023-PAP, ordered the implementation of this benefit for Mr. Sanjeev Kumar and 12 other individuals who were parties to OA 4474/2018.
• Accordingly, all these 13 individuals received pay fixation that took their Special Allowance into account. However, the said order explicitly mentioned that this specific implementation would not be treated as a precedent for any other case.
• This selective implementation is arbitrary and unjust. The proposal should be implemented for all PO & RMS Accountants, especially since the same benefit has already been implemented in other departments, with only the Postal Department having lagged behind
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