Fitment factor may increase beyond limits in 8th Pay Commission!
The Modi government made a big announcement in january 2024 that after the completion of the tenure of the 7th Pay Commission in december 2025, a new i.e. 8th Pay Commission will be constituted. As soon as this was confirmed, a question arose among crores of central employees and pensioners across the country that how much will the salary increase this time? So far the government has not announced the name of the chairman and other members of the 8th Pay Commission, but discussions are in full swing. Along with this, there is a discussion about what will be the fitment factor and also whether DA (dearness allowance) will be merged in the basic pay or not.
How is the fitment factor applied?
Now let's talk about what this fitment factor is. Actually, it is a kind of multiplier, through which the new salary is decided by multiplying the old basic salary. This factor is decided keeping in mind DA i.e. dearness allowance and the current economic conditions. Its purpose is that all employees get equal and fair increase. If we talk about the last few pay commissions, the same trend has been seen that before increasing the salary, dearness allowance i.e. DA is merged in the basic salary and after that the fitment factor is applied on that total.
Understand with an example
For example, when the 7th Pay Commission was implemented in 2016, at that time the employees were getting 125 percent DA. The commission had suggested a fitment factor of 2.57. That is, if the basic salary of an employee was 10,000, then adding 125 percent DA i.e. 12,500, the total becomes 22,500. By adding the actual increase of 14.22 percent to this, the new salary was fixed at 25,700. That means fitment factor = 25,700 / 10,000 = 2.57.
A similar pattern was seen in previous pay commissions. During the 5th Pay Commission (1996), DA was around 74 percent and the fitment factor was kept at 1.86. In the 6th Pay Commission (2006), DA was around 115 percent and the fitment benefit was kept at 1.86x, which also included the concept of grade pay. Whereas in the 7th Pay Commission (2016), DA was 125 percent and the fitment factor was fixed at 2.57.
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