Dearness Allowance, Dearness Relief and Minimum wages likely to go up as the Modi Govt is set to revise the base year of CPI-IW
The
Consumer Price Index – Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) is used as a
benchmark for calculating dearness allowance for government employees,
dearness relief for pensioners and wages for industrial workers
NEW
DELHI: Industrial workers’ salary and government employees’ dearness
allowance (DA) are likely to go up as the union government is set to
revise the base year of the Consumer Price Index — Industrial Workers
(CPI-IW).
The
base year will be revised to 2016 from 2001 to reflect changing
consumption pattern of the working class population over the years. The
CPI-IW is used as a benchmark for calculating dearness allowance for
government employees, dearness relief for pensioners and wages for
industrial workers.
“We
are revising it in next few days and it will benefit a cross section of
workers and pensioners,” said Apurva Chandra, the union labour
secretary.
CPI-IW
is managed by the labour bureau of the ministry along with CPI-
Agricultural Workers (CPI-AL) and CPI-Rural workers (CPI RL).
The
revised index will be made public next week and will likely give more
weight to changing consumption patterns, and extra spending on
education, healthcare, transportation and increasing urban housing cost,
etc.
It
will also calculate data from larger industrial segment base – nearly
90 centres compared with around 78 centres now – to capture ground
realities.
As
per latest data, year-on-year inflation (CPI-IW) stood at 5.63% for
August compared to 5.33% for July and 6.31% recorded in August 2019.
“The
increase in CPI-IW will have a positive effect on wages/salaries of
industrial workers engaged in organised sector besides government
employees and pensioners. The rise in annual inflation is mainly due to
the rise in prices of items like Rice, Potato, Brinjal, Onion, etc,”
labour minister Santosh Gangwar, had said on 30 September while
releasing the CPI-IW for the month of August.
Source: LiveMint
