APPOINTMENT OF SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF POSTS
(Click the link below to view)
FLASH NEWS
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Friday, July 29, 2016
HIGH LEVEL COMMITTEE AND MACP – COM. SHIV GOPAL MISHRA, SECRETARY, JCM (NC) STAFF SIDE & CONVENER NJCA WRITES TO CABINET SECRETARY. (Letters already written to Home Minister, Finance Minister & Railway Minister – see older posts in website)
Click below to view – Letters address Cabinet Secretary
SAD NEWS
Com. Mahabir Singh All India Treasurer (CHQ)& Ex-Circle
Secretary, ex- Divisional Secretary All India Postal Employees Union Postmen
& Group `D` Delhi Circle and Ex- Director Postal & RMS Co-Operative Bank Ambala Cant expired on
28-7-2016 after prolonged illness.
All India Postal Employees
Union Postmen & Group `D CHQ conveys its heartfelt condolences to his
bereaved family members & comrades.
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
DRAFT TRIENNIAL REPORT OF CONFEDERATION
OF CENTRAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES AND WORKERS
FOR THE PERIOD FROM MAY 2013 TO JULY 2016
TO BE PRESENTED IN THE 25TH NATIONAL CONFERENCE
(DIAMOND JUBILEE YEAR NATIONAL CONFERENCE) TO BE HELD AT CHENNAI
FROM 16.08.2016 TO 18.08.2016
To,
All National Secretariat Members of Confederation
Dear Comrades,
Please read the draft report attached below and any additions, alterations or corrections needed may be sent through email to the Confederation CHQ (confederationhq@gmail.com ORmkrishnan6854@gmail.com) on or before 31st July 2016.
M. Krishnan
Secretary General
Confederation
Mob: 09447068125, 09968898009
E-mail: mkrishnan6854@gmail.com
GDS Court case -
GDS Court Case proceedings in Pr.CAT, Delhi :
Next date of hearing fixed on 16-08-2016
Monday, July 25, 2016
25 years of the Open Era: Reviewing India’s post-liberalisation economy
Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao with then finance minister Manmohan Singh, and other cabinet colleagues and senior officials at the Delhi airport, before leaving for a visit to Russia in June 1994
The 1901 novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Nobel winner Thomas Mann is a story of how ambitions and fortunes change over generations. Economists sometimes call it the `Buddenbrooks’ effect.
The first generation toils a lifetime to earn money, buying means of comfort and securing a better future. The second aspires to climb up the social ladder by occupying positions in bureaucracy and politics. When the third generation comes along, social prestige and opulence become a given. So, they look for a life of music and arts, worrying little about the rather earthy anxieties that occupied their ancestors. India, Asia’s third largest economy, after China and Japan, is a veritable jumble of all the three generations. A quarter century of economic reforms mean some have made their millions, while millions continue to earn their keep from farms but their children aspire to match upscale lifestyles.
At the level of the household, the visible face of the 1991 reforms is the quest to beat poverty through enterprise. It is sometimes said the elephant, a popular metaphor for the Indian economy, has begun moving.
UPWARD MOBILITY
The average earning of an Indian, measured as per capita income, has risen nearly 15 times since 1991 — from Rs 6,295 to Rs 93,293. Even after adjusting for inflation, incomes have jumped five-and-a-half times, mirroring rising spending power.
Desirable jobs for the young have expanded from the fields of medicine, engineering and government service to working in coffee shops and large retail floors. Sixty-five-year-old Jai Singh took a giant leap of faith 20 years ago when he quit his job in an electrical equipment store in central Delhi and started as a newspaper vendor in east Delhi.
This was an era when softer loans, easy land-buying rules and a string of cooperative group housing projects enabled hundreds of middle-class families to own apartments in metropolitan cites.
When the families moved in, captive business opportunities followed. “These societies (apartment blocks) were a market for English newspapers,” Singh told HT. “Sales of business dailies went up in particular, despite their higher issue price. Our sales incentives were hiked,” the last-mile delivery man said.
It may not be statistically rigorous, but the correlation between growing appetite for business information and rising spending capacity is too obvious to miss.
BORROW, SPEND
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) opened up the banking sector to private participation in 1993. This one move was like unclogging a bottlenecked financial services highway.
The RBI wanted to infuse competition, raise efficiency and productivity, while making the consumer the focus of banks.
Private banks, such as HDFC Ltd, ICICI Ltd and UTI Ltd (now Axis), set up shop. Heavy dog-eared ledger books gave way to an era of digital finance. With ATM machines and debit cards, depositing or withdrawing cash could be done on-the-go, a huge transformation from queueing up before tellers. This also dismantled social barriers as an ATM machine does not distinguish between a CEO and a daily wage earner.
Forced to tone up, public-sector banks computerised their services too, but had to contend with strikes from employees’ unions, who felt threatened.
“Technology-driven solutions are the way forward. It saves money, delivers quicker services and also helps bridge the digital divide. A bank account is like financial liberation, giving a sense of empowerment to those at the bottom of the pyramid,” said SS Kohli, former chairman and managing director of Punjab National Bank and former chairman of IIFCL, an infrastructure finance company. Alongside, faster access to loans opened up private enterprise. Singh, the newspaper vendor, for instance, remembers borrowing ₹4 lakh from a bank to pay for the engineering education of the second of his three daughters and for expanding his business. “Our elder daughter is an MBA, working for an MNC in Gurgaon. The younger one is working for a publishing house and moving overseas shortly. My daughters are my lifetime investments,” he said.
Some, however, learnt it hard.
Thousands of small savers allegedly duped by promoters of a deposits-collecting firm Saradha in West Bengal a few years ago is emblematic of a bustling cash economy that still has millions outside the formal, banking sector.
The current government’s Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana aims to bring banking services to every adult. Arguably the world’s largest financial inclusion scheme, it was launched in 2014 to give access to formal banking services to a vast majority of India’s poor. About 200 million new accounts have been opened so far, with a combined deposit corpus of more than ₹40,000 crore.
For those who still lack access to formal credit, the only way to seek a better future is to loan money at exorbitant rates from private lenders.
“Kya bachta hai (I have no savings),” said Sikander, a roadside tea-seller, who makes Rs 15,000 a month.
As RBI governor Raghuram G Rajan wrote in a paper “India and Economic Freedom”, that in order to take advantage of expanded opportunities in a market economy as an adult, children first need access to nutrition, healthcare and education. “Moreover, going forward, she has to have access to finance so that the lack of wealth does not hamper her,” Rajan stated in the paper written while he was at Chicago University’s Booth School of Business.
For small informal borrowers such as Sikander, a formal, tenured loan from a finance company is also a ticket to a world of financial services. Besides freeing them from the clutches of private money lenders, it also gives them a “credit score” that vouches for their credit worthiness.
“Nearly 70% of our customers do not have credit score and they don’t have the access for loan. We are trying to educate the customer. As soon as they pass the first loan, we help get them their first credit score,” said Tomas Hrdlicka of Home Credit India Finance, a Czech Republic-based company offering small sized loans in smaller Indian towns.
GROWING UP
Indian industry is a perfect example of the text-book “infant industry” model. An Indian company, Tata Motors, owns and runs Jaguar Land Rover— one of the world’s most iconic auto brand.
In 25 years, the infant has grown up. No longer protected in a state-guided cocoon and surviving global competition. From the iconic software industry that has fuelled middle-class aspirations to conventional brick-and-mortar companies, there’s an entrepreneurial success story out there.
“The early 1990s were the first heady years of India’s post-reforms era. The opening up of the economy meant that India’s manufacturing sector had to stand up to the multinational corporations and from cheap Chinese products as import barriers were lifted,” said Anil Rai Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director of Havells.
Havells, which stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of GE and Phillips in the global electrical goods markets, now has group revenues of about ₹5,500 crore) with brands such as Havells, Standard, Crabtree, Reo and Promptec in its bouquet. “This required unflinching commitment to quality control,” Gupta said.
Most experts reckon that India is now in the “age of high mass consumption” characterised by widespread use of consumer goods, mirroring economist Walt Whitman Rostow’s theory of the stages of economic growth expounded in 1960.
Rural households now pay for most goods and services usually associated with urban lifestyles -- from cars and microwaves and laundry services to air travel and even out-of-home dining.
A recent government survey showed that rural households now spend about 21 per cent of their monthly service-related budget on eating out compared to 22 per cent by city dwellers, a sign of converging lifestyles. Former Coca-Cola Company executive Neville Isdell, when he came out of retirement to become the beverage giant’s chief executive in 2004, surprised many by including India among his first international visits. The tour had an important lesson: summers in India were crucial to offset weaker consumer demand in the home markets of North America.
STILL HUNGRY
Even as India posted stunning growth rates post-reforms, averaging 6.8 per cent between 1991-92 and 2015-16, its poor socio-economic indices tell a different story.
The World Bank reckons that India is home to nearly a quarter (270 million) of the world’s poor. Indian estimates of poverty range from 270 million to 450 million people. By most standards, India has been a “welfare laggard,” despite the massive strides in overall growth. India’s per capita income is set to cross ₹1,00,000 a year in the next few years. The figure gives an idea of the standard of living of the people, although it hides a stark reality: much of the growth in income may have been driven by the richest Indians.
In 2015, according to Forbes, the 100 richest in India had a combined net worth of $345 billion or ₹23 lakh crore, representing 18 per cent of the India’s GDP. Yet, official data also shows that almost 200 million people in the country are malnourished.
With a $2 trillion GDP, India may be counted among the richest in the world, but it still has a long way to go before it can reach food into every mouth.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has long argued for expanding both “hard” and “soft infrastructure”. As India’s economy expands, it will need a skilled workforce to support the expansion.
If India’s billionaires are routinely weighed on an international scale, the poor deserve the privilege too. And it cannot happen without reforms and more reforms for many years at a stretch.
Text and research: Gaurav Choudhury
Chennai GPO may be first T.N. post bank
CHENNAI, July 25, 2016
New endeavour:The Postal Department is planning to
offer banking services, particularly in rural areas. —
Chennai General Post Office (GPO) is likely to be
first post bank in the State to be launched early next year. The Department of
Posts is planning to set up ‘India Post Payment Banks’ (IPPB) using the postal
network to provide banking services to people.
Aimed at providing access to banking services to
people particularly in rural areas, the IPPB will provide a range of services,
including direct benefit transfers and facilitate various payments like old age
pension and government subsidies. The vast network of post offices would be
used to eventually even deliver the payment at the doorstep of customers.
Officials of the postal department said such post banks would function as
separate entity and function according to the guidelines of Reserve Bank of India.
Mervin Alexander, postmaster General (Chennai city
region), said, “Payment banks will deal with money remittances of all kinds to
people. This could be useful to people particularly in rural areas who have
limited access to banks. But, it will not provide loans. However, savings
schemes and deposits will remain under post offices at this point of time.”
Earlier, core banking network solutions and postal ATMs were started as part of
an initiative to provide banking services at post offices.
Net banking and mobile banking will be the next
step towards reinventing the postal services according to the changing trend.
The department has also announced a competition for logo design and tagline for
the proposed IPPB. The tagline should not exceed eight words either in English
or Hindi and the best entries will be awarded with a cash prize of Rs.25,000.
The last date of submission is July 31.
Source : http://www.thehindu.com
State Minister for Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak on Thursday said the government would turn 8,500 post offices into e-centres by June, 2017 to disseminate information and communication technology services to the rural people across the country. He said this on behalf of State Minister for Post and Telecommunications Begum Tarana Halim while replying to a starred question from treasury bench member Sukumar Ranjan Ghosh in the House.
The
government has undertaken a project named Post E-Centre for the Rural Community
to turn the post offices into e-centers, he said adding, these e-centers would
minimize the digital divide between cities and villages, create employment
facilities in villages and develop information and technology based skilled
manpower.
He
said after completing the project, the people would get more updated facilities
from post offices and they would be able to track and trace their letters
sitting at home. The people would also be able to use cash, postal cash cards
or electronic money transfer service (EMTS) and to pay their e-commerce bills
through the services, Palak said. Meanwhile, establishment of the ICT based
rural post offices has been completed and such 1,000 more offices will be
established by June 2017, he added.
Source : http://dailyasianage.com/
More than 47 lakh Central Government
employees and 53 lakh pensioners have been eagerly waiting for implementation
of 7th Pay Commission.
By India.com News Desk on July
23, 2016 at 11:48 PM
New
Delhi, July 23: The newly appointed IAS officer Rajesh Kumar Chaturvedi
who was given an additional charge of chief of implementation cell of the 7th
pay Commission is likely to issue a notification of salary hike within seven
days. Chaturvedi who had earlier worked as a Central Board of Secondary
Education (CBSE) chief has been working on the implementations of 7CPC
recommendations which was approved by Narendra Modi government last month.
According
to a Finance Ministry official quoted by The Sen Times, the cell will issue the
notification within 7 to 10 days. Which means more than 47 lakh Central
Government employees eagerly waiting for the pay hike will get their increased
salaries under the new pay matrix from August 1, excluding new allowances.
The
implementation cell chief has been appointed by the Union Government to avoid
national level strike threatened by union officials. The appointment of
Chaturvedi came on Thursday, as Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT)
named him as the chief of implementation cell of 7CPC.
Chaturvedi,
who had worked as a CBSE chief earlier is a Madhya Pradesh cadre IAS officer of
1987 batch, was three months ago given the additional charge of Joint Secretary
in the cell for three months. But after Ministry’s order, the cell is to be
headed by Chaturvedi with the help of nine other staff.
The
Union Cabinet decided to constitute a committee headed by Finance Secretary for
further examination of the recommendations of 7CPC on allowances including HRA,
DA, health insurance, transport allowance and many other. The Cabinet had
accepted some recommendations but with the many Central Government employees
are unhappy as the requested minimum wage was increased to Rs 18,000 and the
demand was made of Rs 26,000.
The
Central Government employees had also threatened to call for an indefinite
strike from July 11 which was later called off after Union Government decided
to set up a high-level committee to look into their demand. More than 47
lakh Central Government employees and 53 lakh pensioners have been eagerly
waiting for implementation of 7CPC.
Saturday, July 23, 2016
CASUAL LABOURERS WITH TEMPORARY STATUS - CLARIFICATION REGARDING CONTRIBUTION TO GPF AND PENSION UNDER THE OLD PENSION SCHEME Click here to view - Order
Saturday, July 23, 2016
CLARIFICATION ON THE DEFINITION OF "MEMBERS OF FAMILY" IN THE CONTEXT OF RULE 4 OF CCS (CONDUCT) RULES-1964. CLICK HERE TO VIEW
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Without the official notification, the salaries
received by central government employees on August 1 would not be hiked as per
the CPC recommendations.
New Delhi, July 20: Although the revised
recommendations of 7th Pay Commission has received a formal nod of approval
from the Union Cabinet, the gazette notification for finalizing the salary hike
is awaited. Without the official notification, the salaries received by central
government employees on August 1 would not be hiked as per the CPC recommendations.
Government has to notify the new pay scale within 7 days in order to implement
the 14.29 percent hike in basic pay.
Although the CPC recommendations were cleared on
June 29, the issuance of official notification was delayed since the government
was facing protest from several employee unions over a range of anomalies
related to allowances. Apart from the pay parity issues, a larger section of
the employee union led by National National Joint Action Committee (NJAC)
had demanded the increase in entry-level salary from Rs 18,000 (as per new
recommendations) to Rs 26,000.
The unions had earlier threatened to launch a
nationwide strike from July 11. Nearly 33 lakh central government employees
belonging to Post, Railways and Defence were expected to participate in the
protest. However, following the setup of a High Level Committee by the
government to look into their demands, they deferred their strike by at least
four months.
7th Pay Commission is considered to be, by far, the
lowest ever salary hike implemented in the past 70 years. Including allowances,
the hike is only 23.5 percent.
The implementation of CPC recommendations would
positively impact a total of 47 lakh government employees, along with 53 lakh
pensioners. It would also add an excessive burden on the Centre. However,
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley claims that the hike in salaries would instead
rejuvenate the economy by giving a inserting a demand-driven bang in the
domestic market. Source :
http://www.india.com/
Press Information
Bureau
Government of India
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions
20-July-2016 15:03 IST
Government of India
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions
20-July-2016 15:03 IST
Grievance officer
As per guidelines issued by Department of Administrative Reforms &
Public Grievances, each Ministry/Department/Public Sector
Undertaking/Autonomous Organization is required to designate a full time
Grievance Officer, known as Director of Public Grievances. The Director of
Public Grievances shall be actively involved in the process of dealing with
grievances. Every Wednesday of the week has been earmarked for the Director of
Public Grievances for hearing the grievances of the citizens. The names of the
Directors of Public Grievances for various Ministries/Departments are available
on http://www.pgportal.gov.in.
As per guidelines issued by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, a grievance is required to be redressed within a period of two months. In case, it is not possible an interim reply with reasons for delay is required to be provided.
This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Shri Prahlad Singh Patel in the Lok Sabha today.
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
India Post seeks services of students, unemployed for delivering goods
With online orders piling up, India Post is hiring students and the jobless to deliver goods, S.K. Sinha, secretary at the department of post, said on Thursday.
The department recently issued orders under which it can hire third-party persons, such as unemployed people and students, to pick up and deliver articles from post offices, with a 12% commission for every delivery.
“If you pick up about 10 orders of about 1 kg, you can earn Rs100-250 per day,” said Sinha, adding that the programme will also help generate employment. There’s an upper limit for how much commission you can earn.
The outsourcing will augment its parcel service and bring it at par with other private parcel services that offer to pick up orders from the customer’s location.
The postal department’s revenue from COD (cash on delivery) consignments from e-commerce majors surged to Rs.1,300 crore in the year ending March 2016, up from Rs.500 crore in 2014-15, and just Rs.100 crore in 2013-14.
E-commerce firms availing India Post’s services include all the major online portals such as Amazon India, Flipkart as well as Snapdeal.
The requirements to register for the program is an identification proof and reference from two prominent person known to the post office, after which the third party will be given a licence to deliver and pick up articles.
With e-commerce and financial services expected to take off, the department is expecting earnings from these services to help break even in the next 6-7 years.
India Post recorded a deficit of about Rs.6,000 crore for fiscal year 2015, a 14.4% increase from a year earlier.
The department is also looking at revenue from its online service, e-post office, which sells philately products as well as the newly launched bottled Gangajal, water from the river Ganga.
There is strong demand for Gangajal with almost all the stock sold out, added Sinha.
India Post has sold at least 4,000 bottles of Gangajal, considered holy by Hindus, from its post offices and online and has witnessed strong demand from southern states such as Tamil Nadu.
“While India Post doesn’t generate any profit from the Gangajal program, it does create a lot of goodwill for the department, which in turn can help attract users for its speed post and banking services,” Sinha said.
Source :Live Mint
New Delhi: The Centre plans to amend the CCS (Conduct) Rules for baring its officials from making any criticism of government on social media, television and any other communication application.
Right now, the conduct rules do bar government officials from criticizing the government on a radio broadcast, communication over any public media, in any document, in any communication to the press or in any public utterance.
However, to make the rules specific to social media given presence of many officials on the same, a note is now proposed to be added to the All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968 saying: “The member of service shall also not make any such statement on television, social media or any other communication application. The word ‘Document’ may also include a caricature.”
This implies that any criticism of the government or its policies on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or on social networking groups like WhatsApp or through the officer drawing out a caricature will also attract disciplinary action under the Conduct Rules. The step comes after a committee constituted to review All India Service Rules has proposed certain amendments to the Conduct Rules.
Under the rules, a statement by an official is considered critical of the government if it has the effect of an adverse criticism of any current or recent policy or action of the Central Government or a State Government, which is capable of embarrassing the relations between the Central Government and any State Government or which is capable of embarrassing the relations between the Central Government and the Government of any Foreign State. All such statements by officials will not stand barred on social media.
In the context of social media, the government however wants to introduce a provision allowing government officials to participate in any public media including social media websites without the prior sanction of the government if the same is required by the officer as part of bonafide discharge of his duties. Many officials have joined Twitter and Facebook to communicate government decisions and the provision seems to be aimed at the same.
The government also plans to tweak an existing rule and plans to specify that government officials can take part in “simple and inexpensive entertainment events arranged by public bodies or institutions”.
In another tweak to the conduct rules, the government plans to introduce a provision whereby the official will be required to intimate the government of the purchase of an asset like automobiles or household equipment only if its value exceeds two months of his basic pay.
Inputs with ET
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Friday, July 15, 2016
The General Secretaries,
All Affiliated Unions,
Dear Comrades!
In continuation of our earlier letter of even number dated 8th July, 2016, wherein clarification was issued, whether payment of salaries based on 7th CPC recommendations will be made from current month or otherwise, it is hereby clarified that; salary of August month will be based on 7th CPC recommendations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)