Tamil Nadu Professors to Get 18% to 24% Salary Hike

Teachers in government colleges and universities in the Tamil Nadu state are set to get a salary hike after a gap of nearly 10 years. Based on the 7th pay commission recommendation, the state government will issue orders revising their pay scale in a week’s time, said a senior government official, adding that their salaries would rise by 18% to 24%.

Under the new pay scale, professors are set to earn a basic pay of more than Rs 1.4 lakh per month. The pay of entry-level teaching staff like assistant professors will be hiked to around Rs 70,000 per month from around Rs 55,000.

“The changes would come into notional effect from January 1, 2016 and monetary effect from October 1, 2017,” said the official. This indicates that government teachers would also be losing arrears for 21 months on the lines of other state government employees.

Tamil Nadu is set to be the second state in the country to revise the pay of government teachers based on the seventh pay commission recommendations as directed by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Teacher unions were uncertain about TN adopting the UGC’s revised pay scale since the central government had earlier announced that it would reduce its financial contribution from 80% to 50%.

However, a senior government official said that the state government will be bearing the additional financial burden.

A rationalisation index of 2.67 has been adopted while calculating the entry or basic pay for assistant and associate professors. Accordingly, the basic pay of assistant professors would vary from Rs.57,700-79,800. Associate professors would get a basic pay of Rs.1.31 lakh, while the basic pay of professors has been fixed at Rs.1.4-1.8 lakh as per the revised scale.

Teachers would be receiving dearness, city compensation, house rent and medical allowances over and above the basic pay. While DA would be 7% of the basic pay, other allowances will vary according to their location and pay scales.

M Ravichandran, the retired principal of a government college, said it was a pity that no other state except Arunachal Pradesh had come forward to adopt UGC’s revised pay scale, adding that the move by Tamil Nadu was a welcome step.

“TN will be a pioneering state in recognising the services of college education. For additional details, one needs to wait till the actual government order is issued,” he added.

Source: TOI