Although 7th Pay Commission has brought good news to millions of government employees across the country and spans central government as well as state governments, there are millions of others still waiting for the same. Their salaries are still decided by the old system even as they are seeing their colleagues elsewhere drawing big amounts now. And out of these, there are 5,000 agricultural scientists, associated with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). They have been waiting patiently, but as the wait turned interminable, they were forced to put their views across via a protest - they recently observed a day-long silent protest across India.

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According to reports, these agriculture scientists, under the aegis of Agricultural Research Service Scientists Forum (ARSSF), went to work with black ribbons tied to their arms with the demand that the 7th Pay Commission report be applied to them too. There are close to 100 ICAR-run institutes in the country. These employees have been arguing for a 7th CPC based hike ever since it was first unveiled and cleared by the Centre, but the wait has been long and endless, especially for the employees working in various states, said a Times of India report.

“The 7th pay commission was announced in 2016, but we still haven’t received the hike. All other government employees cutting across departments have got the benefits of the revised pay commission and only we have been left out. We kept waiting quietly until November 2017 when ICAR took up the matter with the Union finance ministry and we were assured that our arrears would be cleared by January 2018," ARSSF’s all-India president Dr IM Mishra told TOI.

Dr S Manivannam, the council’s all-India general secretary, was quoted as saying, “What we know is that the files regarding this issue keep rotating between ICAR management and finance ministry. No one has been able to explain to us the reasons behind the delay.”

Sanjeev Kumar, ARSSF’s district president and principal scientist at the Bareilly-based Central Avian Research Institute, was also quoted as saying, “The government has accepted the recommendations of the UGC Pay Review Committee. Even then we have been deprived of our right.”