Bhubaneswar: With legislators cutting across the political parties demanding higher pay and additional funds under LAD, the Odisha Cabinet today increased salaries and pensions of MLAs, ministers, chief minister, leader of opposition, speaker, deputy speaker, government chief whip and deputy government chief whip.
The sub-panel of the amenities committee today decided to increase the monthly salary and other allowances of MLAs from Rs 58,000 to Rs 1 lakh.
While chief minister’s salary has been hiked to Rs 98,000, deputy chief minister and speaker will now earn Rs 97,500 monthly as compared to Rs 58,500 earlier. The hike will also see salaries of ministers, leader of opposition and government chief whip increase from Rs 58,000 to Rs 97,000.
Similarly, ministers of state and deputy speaker will now get a salary of Rs 95,000 monthly, while deputy ministers will get Rs 93,000 against a previous salary of Rs 56,000.
A breakdown of the total salary shows, that car allowance for all has been increased from Rs 10,000 to Rs 17,000 while sumptuary allowance has been hiked from Rs 24,000 to Rs 40,000.
The State government had revised the emoluments last time in 2009.
Earlier in the day several MLAs from both ruling and Opposition parties met chief minister Naveen Patnaik and urged him to approve the salary hike demands while further asking him to increase funds under MLA Local Area Development (LAD) fund to a minimum of Rs 3 crore from Rs 1 crore.
Legislators have been demanding for fatter pay packets for quite some time now and the issue had heated up the Budget session of the Assembly back in April.