The Andhra Pradesh government released a GO yesterday, granting the state government employees a 23% fitment on their salaries. However, this has caused great dissatisfaction among the state government employees, as their house rent allowance has been sharply cut, resulting in them drawing lesser salaries every month from now on.
The state government employees have today gone to their offices, sporting black badges, and the leaders of the Andhra Pradesh Joint Action Committee (AP JAC) and AP JAC Amaravati even held a meeting today, discussing the course of action that is to be taken, not ruling out a potential strike in the coming days, if the government fails to meet the demands of the employees.
AP JAC chairman Bandi Srinivasa Rao and AP JAC Amaravati chairman Bopparaju Venkateswarlu demanded the government continue paying Interim Relief and also release the arrears of Dearness Allowance (DA). They said there has been no instance in the state’s history of a pay revision being lower than IR, which is the current situation. It is now to be seen if the AP government will bend to the employees’ demand and make revisions to the GO, or what sort of events it would lead to, in the future.