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

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