Livemint: New Delhi: Tuesday, August
09, 2016.
The monthly
salary of all officers working in the prime minister’s office (PMO) has been
made public as part of suo motu disclosure under the Right to Information (RTI)
Act with senior Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Bhaskar Khulbe the
highest paid at `2.01 lakh.
Khulbe, who
is secretary to the prime minister, gets a monthly remuneration of `2.01 lakh,
according to details of the salary as on 1 June 2016 put on the PMO website.
Nripendra
Mishra, principal secretary to the PM; national security adviser Ajit Doval,
and P.K. Mishra, additional principal secretary to Modi, get `1,62,500 per
month, plus pension, each.
All these top
bureaucrats are retired civil servants.
Six joint
secretaries in the PMO Tarun Bajaj, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, T.V. Somanathan, A.K.
Sharma, Anurag Jain and Debashree Mukherjee get a monthly salary ranging
between `1.55 lakh and `1.77 lakh, it said.
Rajeev Topno
and Sanjeev Kumar Singla, both private secretaries to the PM, get a monthly
salary of `1.46 lakh and Rs 1.38 lakh, respectively.
Sharat
Chander, information officer, and J.M. Thakkar, public relations officer in the
PMO, get a monthly remuneration of `1.26 lakh and `99,000, respectively,
according to the PMO website.
Five other
bureaucrats including the PM’s close aide Sanjay R. Bhavsar, working as officer
on special duty (OSD) in the PMO, draws monthly remuneration of around `1.1
lakh, it said.
Besides
Bhavsar, four other OSDs are Hiren Joshi, Pratik Doshi, Hemang Jani and
Ashutosh Narayan Singh.
The PMO has
also made public details of monthly remuneration given to the secretary to
former prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.
N.C, Jhingta,
secretary to Vajpayee, gets `1.42 lakh while G. Muralidhar Pillay, Singh’s
Secretary, draws monthly remuneration of `1 lakh (plus pension), the PMO said.
These
disclosures have been made under Section 4 of the RTI Act that casts an
obligation on all public authorities to suo motu disclose, among others,
details of remuneration given to all its employees for the sake of
transparency.