Amaravati: From the day one of implementing the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), all the State government employees have been opposing it and demanding successive Chief Ministers to address this problem by rolling back to the previous pension scheme. In fact, the CPS was first introduced and implemented during 2004 by the then Chief Minister YS Rajasekhar Reddy. After that, the employees demanded Rajasekhar Reddy to rollback the old pension scheme (OPS). The employees continued their agitation during the regimes of Chief Ministers including Konijeti Rosaiah, Kiran Kumar Reddy, Nara Chandrababu Naidu and now YS Jagan Mohan Reddy.
Crux of the issue:
While implementing the CPS, the government through GO MS No 655, dated September 22, 2004 mandated each and every employee as follows: “It is mandatory for all the new employees, who are recruited on or after 1-9-2004 to become members of the Scheme. Each employee will pay a monthly contribution of 10% of the Basic Pay and DA from his salary to the Contributory Pension Scheme. A matching contribution will be made by the State Government for each employee who contributes to the scheme. The contribution towards the Contributory Pension Scheme shall be recovered from the salary of the employees every month as is done now for the General Provident Fund.” The new pension scheme under the name of Contributory Pension Scheme was introduced through GO MS No 653, GP MS No 654 and GO MS No 655 on September 22, 2004, when Rajasekhar Reddy was Chief Minister of the united Andhra Pradesh.
There was an attempt to heal the problem to a certain extent during the 2014-19 tenure of Chandrababu Naidu. The TDP government constituted the SP Tucker committee, an expert committee to review and suggest abolition of CPS in Andhra Pradesh, which submitted its recommendations with some suggestions in February 2019. In short, the Expert Committee proposed two options for quitting from CPS to Old Pension Scheme (OPS). The first option was to revert back to OPS, which is a prerogative of the State government. And the second option was, equalize or nearly equalize the CPS and OPS systems and provide Minimum Assured Return to the employees.
Meanwhile, the TDP lost elections in 2019 and YSRCP won with a thumping majority. At the time of election campaign, Jagan Reddy assured the employees that he would abolish the CPS within a week after he assumed office of Chief Minister. In fact, Jagan Reddy used the CPS as a trump card to influence the government employees and turned them into YSRCP voters, who were demanding to abolish the new pension scheme.
After getting into power, the YSRCP government could not abolish the CPS as promised. Instead, it constituted a Group of Ministers to examine the Tucker Committee Report on CPS on August 1, 2019. Later, the government advisors hinted that it would not possible to abolish the CPS and it had many financial and legal complications. At the time of protests of employees on the implementation of better Pay Revision Commission (PRC) recommendations, they raised the CPS issue. Many employees’ unions and organizations in the State have been demanding the State government to abolish the CPS.
Since it remained as a sustained and important demand from a large number of government employees, both TDP and YSRCP have been estimating that it would be one of the crucial election promises in 2024 in Andhra Pradesh.
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