Bhubaneswar: On the eve of New Year, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday announced a 3 per cent hike in the dearness allowance (DA) of the state government employees.
The hike will be effective retrospectively from July 1, 2021. With this, the DA for Odisha government employees went up to 31 per cent.
Similarly, the Dearness Relief for pensioners has also been increased by 3 per cent. In total, 7.5 lakh government employees and pensioners in the state will be benefited from this move, officials said.
It may be mentioned that the state government had hiked the DA during Durga Puja by 11 per cent taking the total to 28 per cent.
In addition to this, the Chief Minister also announced the release of 30 per cent arrears from pay scale revision under the 7th Pay Commission. This will benefit around 4 lakh government employees in the state.
Notably, the state government employees have already received 50 per cent of their increased pay for the period from January 2016 to August 2017 as per the recommendations of 7th Pay Commission.
Ms Kalinga