ISLAMABAD, Nov 15: In order to provide housing to government employees, Dr Ishrat Husain, Chairman Pay and Pension Commission and former Governor State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has come up with a unique proposal. According to the proposal, official residences of government officers, which are limited in number, would be commercialised and sold to private builders, who would construct apartments and flats on the property. This way the perennial issue of shortage of housing for government officers would be resolved.  

“However, we do not recommend allotting the units to the existing occupants as it had been done in the case of monetisation of vehicles,” Dr Husain said, adding, “These are prime lands in the federal capital and cannot be handed over to only 15 per cent of the federal government employees.”

Talking to media in the Parliament house, he said that the government houses were not available to around 85 per cent of the government employees and something had to be done in this regard.

He said that the proposal also includes options to build high rise residential flats for the employees on existing single units, so that more employees could be accommodated or to establish a residential colony around the federal capital, where the land is cheap and each retiring employee could be given a residential plot.

The Chairman Pay and Pension Commission acknowledged the misuse of the policy related to monetisation of transport facility, and said that he would write a letter to the finance ministry to ensure that those who have obtained the ownership of official cars under the schemes, were not using other official vehicles for personal use.

“The schemes allow use of official vehicles for office work only,” he said and added that however, the scheme did not apply on government corporate sector and many ministries were using vehicles belonging to these autonomous bodies.

He informed that by the end of this fiscal year, the Commission would examine the saving after monetisation of transport facility.

He also said that the Commission would propose unified pay scales — salary structure of all government departments would be equal, presently a few departments are drawing higher salaries than other departments — for all 2.5 million civilian federal and provincial employees and there would be no option to retain any other pay scale.

He informed that the Executive, Armed Forces and Judiciary would not be subjected to uniform pay scales package and they would continue to remain in their existing pay packages.

Formula for the determination of pension would be revised. Presently pension is determined by the last pay drawn. In the new formula, other incentives would be given to government officers and pension amount would be reduced.

Commission is awaiting recommendations of all the four provinces, in this regard meetings with Chief Secretaries and Finance Secretaries have already been completed to finalise the proposed package elimination of distortion in pay structure of the employees.