As it happens, in India today persons of the Civil Service having only seven, eight or nine years’ service are acting in the Secretariat as Secretaries and Joint Secretaries and getting much higher pay, a pay which, if India were not, independent, they would get after serving for eighteen or nineteen years. So, speedy elevation has been given to many Civil Service people. I want to know as to what will happen to those Secretaries who are more than the minimum guaranteed number of “eight”. As far as I know, only eight posts of Secretaries had been guaranteed. These posts cannot be reduced from eight to seven or six, but at present there are twenty-one Secretaries. Now, the original liability was to pay Rs. 4,000 per month to each of these eight Secretaries. Now, we are paying the same rate of pay to twenty-one Secretaries. I want to know whether after passing this article we will be entitled or not to reduce the number of Secretaries from twenty-one to eight. Now, if this is also a commitment that the coming Governments will have to pay twenty-one Secretaries and a number of Joint Secretaries at the present scale of pay–a number, which is much bigger than the number originally guaranteed–is this not an extra liability on the future Parliament? Or will the future Parliament be free to reduce the number of the Secretaries?
