Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - HT Navi Mumbai Live
State lawmakers get monthly salary hike with immediate effect Skipped lunch in Pak for India’s prestige: Rajnath
The state’s lawmakers on Friday passed a bill raising their own salaries, and that too substantially. While ministers will now draw a salary of Rs1.80 lakh to Rs2 lakh every month from the Rs57,000 they received till now, MLAs and MLCs will earn Rs1.60 lakh to Rs1.70 lakh every month as against Rs75,000. The move is expected to out an annual burden of Rs60 crore on the cashstrapped exchequer, which has a debt burden of around Rs3.5 lakh crore.
Both houses of the legislature cleared the bill, which governs the salary of MLAs, ministers and presiding officers of the legislature. Besides the MLAs and ministers, 1,500 former legislators will `1.60 `1.80 `1.79 `75,000 `57,000 `1.70 `2 `1.99
also get a hike in their monthly pension. It has been raised to Rs50,000 from Rs40,000 every month, and Rs10,000 per term served. Further, even personal assistants will now earn Rs25,000 a month instead of Rs15,000.
A day after he skipped a lunch for Saarc ministers in Islamabad, home minister Rajnath Singh said he did it for the country’s ‘maryada (prestige)’. Singh told Rajya Sabha that Pakistan interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan invited the visiting ministers for lunch “but soon after inviting us, he sat in a car and went off ”. “Keeping in view the norms of conduct, I did what was necessary for the sake of India’s dignity,” he said.