Getting facts and implications wrong

BY hoot desk| IN Media Practice | 27/03/2008

Getting the facts and implications of the Pay Commission payouts right was beyond the competence of most of our esteemed national dailies.

The HOOT DESK squints at the facts and figures dished out and finds them inadequate and misleading.

Journalists are better paid than ever before thanks to media proliferation, greater competition and TV channels poaching on print for reporting talent. But does that mean we¿ve got more competent men and women on the job? Alas, no. You only had to glance over the first lead stories across half a dozen newspapers on the Pay Commission payouts to realize that getting the facts and implications right was beyond most of them.

First, the quantum of hike in salary. Was it 40 per cent (Indian Express, Asian Age and Hindu), 40 to 60 percent (Times of India), 200 per cent in some cases (Hindustan Times), 20 to 40 per cent (Economic Times), 35-50 per cent (Mint) or 28 per cent (Business Standard)? Were they talking pay bands or grade pay, were they taking dearness allowance into account when citing the pre-revised salary and comparing it with the merged one?

Did anybody have tables that made clear sense, that told you at the end of listing columns what they added up to? On the 25^th March the Hindu had on page one a listing of pre revised pay scales and revised pay bands, with a column on grade pay, all of which left you none the wiser as to what either the totally salary for a particular pay band, or the total quantum of increase would be. This was a graphic by KBK and the Asian Age had it too, on page three, and offered no explanations either. Ditto for the Times of India.

Business Standard gave a table citing the new pay band, pay scale and grade pay. They did not tell you what the overall implication was, in this table. They had another table listing rank, old scale, present pay, new pay, and the percentage of hike. This was clearer but the DA component in these figures remained unexplained. And the examples contradicted the paper¿s own headline that the hike was of the order of 28 per cent because it said in the table that the hike for these scales was 39.54 per cent.

Mint gave no tables or any other details to explain how the hike was going to be 35-50 per cent, and for whom. Economic Times was the clearest in this respect: It gave you the category, the present basic salary and the proposed package, and indicated in the table that the present salary was excluding allowances and merged DA. The Indian Express too, unlike the Hindustan Times, had the sense to list existing salaries inclusive of DA. HT did not, and ended up suggesting prominently on page one, photo and all, that cabinet secretary¿s salary would go up 200 per cent from Rs 30,000 to Rs 90,000. The Asian Age too talked of tripling, forgetting to take allowances in the present package into account. The Hindustan Times¿ exclusion of DA for some meant that it ended up suggesting that the chief engineer of the DDA today gets almost twice as much pay as the foreign secretary.

The failure to take a uniform approach led to confusion. Was the cabinet secretary¿s pay going to go up to 90,000 as some papers suggested, or was it going to go up to Rs 103,000 as the Express suggested? Well, only ET explained that the latter figure included allowances and merged DA.

The Times of India too did little to explain how the raise was going to be 40 to 60 per cent but in our view it did the neatest job of front page capsuling of the different elements of the recommendations. No other paper thought it worth highlighting that the salaries of chiefs of regulatory bodies was now going to be upto Rs 3 lakhs a month.

An interview with Justice B N Srikrishna, Chairman of the Sixth Pay Commission, suggest that some of the confusion may have emanated from statements he made. He told Business Standard that the overall hike worked out to 40 per cent over the last Pay Commission. He also said later in the same interview that if you included the 12 per cent DA hike given in 2004 the effective hike worked out to 20 per cent.

And if you take yet another statement given by him in the same interview, at the entry level the starting salary has gone up from Rs 2550 to Rs 6660 which he says is "a near 160 per cent increase."