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About 2,500 retired employees of Nabard are saddled with a peculiar problem -- the pension of retirees is not revised when a new pay scale is introduced.
An employee’s pension is fixed on the last drawn salary. Generally, pensions are revised whenever a new pay scale comes into force. “But not in the case of Nabard retirees,” a former employee of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, said.
The retired employees contend that a regular revision in pension would not be a burden on the exchequer as it is drawn from the Nabard’s pension fund, which had a kitty of Rs 4,447 crore as on March 31, 2019. They argue that there would still be a surplus, even after the additional payouts in pension revisions.
While the pension of their peers in the Reserve Bank of India and other organisations are revised with new pay scales, retirees in Nabard are saddled with a fixed pension. They want this anomaly to be corrected.
They have appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to intervene and have their pensions revised periodically.
Pension rules
They want the Government to amend the relevant Pension Rules, allowing Nabard to revise pension norms that facilitate regular revision of pensions. The additional burden would be about Rs 40-50 crore, which is equivalent to the interest that the Pension Fund generates annually.
“There have been four pay revisions for employees of Nabard since 1993 and the pensions of those retiring after each pay revision are fixed at a higher level. However, the earlier retirees continue to get the same meagre pension that was fixed at the time of their retirement. This disparity between earlier and later retirees is widening with each pay revision,” the All-India Nabard Retired Employees' Welfare Association, has said.
In a memorandum to the Prime Minister, the association cites an example. “Even the lowest ranking officer (Assistant Manager) retiring today, gets a much higher basic pay (Rs 40,915) as compared to the basic pension (Rs 7,925) of the highest ranking (Chief General Manager), who retired in 1992,” it said.
“This has caused acute financial hardship to the older pensioners,” the employee said.
They said lakhs of other government pensioners get regular revision in pensions with each Pay Commission.
They also pointed out that most Nabard pensioners are former employees of the RBI, who were attached to the former organisation when it was carved out of the apex bank in 1982.
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