Salaries account for 75-80% of expenses in PMO: Data
The PMO works daily. There are senior officers who come to office even on Saturdays and Sundays, even if it’s for
3-4 hours. Prime Minister Modi is a workaholic and has not taken a day off since he joined office. SENIOR PMO OFFICIAL
NEW DELHI: Running the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) isn’t easy. It entails a huge annual budget for office expenses that is often overshot. And while the bills for the PM’S foreign visits are settled under the budget head “maintenance of PM’S special aircraft and other charges,” the PMO too incurs expenses on both foreign and domestic tours.
While salaries constitute about 75% to 80% of the total expenses in the country’s top executive office, spending on office expenses comes second, accounting for about 10%to 15% of PMO’S budget every year.
A glance through the annual expenses of the PMO under Narendra Modi also reveals that expenses on staff salaries jumped in 2016-17 because of the implementation of Pay Commission recommendations before stabilising for the next two years.
“The PMO works daily. There are senior officers who come to office even on Saturdays and Sundays, even if it’s for 3-4 hours. Prime Minister Modi is a workaholic and has not taken a day off since he joined office,” said a senior official who worked in the Modi PMO for a long time.
There are 45 officers in the Pmo—the hierarchy starting with Modi’s principal secretary PK Mishra and ending with comcharges, munication and reference officers.
The top brass of the PMO’S bureaucracy consists of Misra, National Security Advisory Ajit Doval, principal advisor PK Sinha, two advisors, Amarjeet Sinha and Bhaskar Khulbe, additional secretary S Gopalakrishnan, five joint secretaries and the PM’S private secretary.
The PMO also has several sections including a social media cell and personal staff of Modi.
The last available expenses of the PMO, for the financial year 2018-19, shows a total expenditure of ~46.9 crore, out of which ~35.96 crore went to pay salaries and another ~5.56 crore for office expenses.
The office expenses include a myriad heads including maintenance of rooms, purchase and maintenance of staff cars, cab purchase of office equipment, stationery and payments for refreshments offered at official meetings.
Between FY15-16 and FY18-19, the PMO paid ~130.28 crore, or 78% of its budget, towards salaries.
Between 2015-16 and 2018-19, the PMO spent an average of ~5.76 lakhs as overtime allowance for staff who worked longer than their stipulated hours. The highest annual overtime bill, ~9.5 lakh, was paid in 2016-17.
During the same period, the PMO incurred ~1.7 crore towards foreign travel. Officials maintain that this amount is for individual tours of officers and other incidental expenses such as daily allowances for the duration of their stay overseas.
A Right to Information query last year showed that Modi and his ministers incurred a total expenditure of ~393 crore on foreign and domestic tours in the last five financial years. The annual expenses for the last fiscal year is not available yet, and an official pointed out that it would be out after all payments are accounted for.
But in 2019-20, the salary expenses may decline as the PMO has reduced staff by about 15% to save on costs. And the spread of the Covid pandemic, a second official said, may lead to a reduction of costs under the heads of overtime and travel expenses.