RTI effect: PMO discloses staff salary; Khulbe paid highest

These disclosures have been made under Section 4 of the Right to Information(RTI) Act The PMO has also made public details of monthly remuneration given to Secretary to former Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh

IAS officer Bhaskar Khulbe, Secretary to the Prime Minister, gets a monthly remuneration of ₹2.01 lakh, according to details of the salary as on June one, 2016 put on the PMO website.

Nripendra Mishra, Principal Secretary to the PM, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and P K Mishra, Additional Principal Secretary to Modi get ₹1,62,500 per month, plus pension, each. All these top bureaucrats are retired civil servants.

Six Joint Secretaries in the PMO--Tarun Bajaj, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, T V Somanathan, A K Sharma, Anurag Jain and Debashree Mukherjee--get a monthly salary ranging between ₹1.55 lakh and ₹1.77 lakh, it said.

Rajeev Topno and Sanjeev Kumar Singla, both private secretaries to the PM, get a monthly salary of ₹1.46 lakh and ₹1.38 lakh respectively.

Sharat Chander, Information Officer, and J M Thakkar, Public Relations Officer in the PMO, get a monthly remuneration of ₹1.26 lakh and ₹99,000, respectively, according to the PMO website.

Five other bureaucrats including the PM's close aide Sanjay R Bhavsar, working as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the PMO, draws monthly remuneration of around ₹1.1 lakh, it said.

Besides Bhavsar, four other OSDs are Hiren Joshi, Pratik Doshi, Hemang Jani and Ashutosh Narayan Singh. The PMO has also made public details of monthly remuneration given to Secretary to former Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. N C Jhingta, Secretary to Vajpayee, gets ₹1.42 lakh while G Muralidhar Pillay, Singh's Secretary, draws monthly remuneration of ₹1 lakh (plus pension), the PMO said.

These disclosures have been made under Section 4 of the Right to Information(RTI) Act that casts an obligation on all public authorities to Suo motu disclose, among others, details of remuneration given to all its employees for the sake of transparency.