Nurses or similar grade employees in the public service are not entitled to the special allowance of Rs.15,000 paid to executive grade officers from January 1, 2020, a senior official of the Public Administration and Home Affairs Ministry said yesterday.

Secretary to the Public Administration Ministry, S. Hettiarachchi said the special payment would only be paid to executive grade officers compliant with a Cabinet decision taken on October 1 this year. Therefore, any public servant other than those identified by the government as executive grade officers will not be paid the special allowance.

While increasing salaries of public servants, the previous government decided to pay a special allowance of Rs.15,000 – irrespective of the period of service – to officers in the category of executive service from January 1, 2020. Following this decision, several nurse unions demanded that the government paid them the said special allowance.

Commenting on this, Director-Establishments Chandana Kumarasinghe said SLAS officers, engineers, accountants and architects fell in the category of executive officers in the public service.

“The officers who are currently paid a special allowance based on the speciality of each service shall not be entitled to this allowance. In the case where the allowance paid to the officers in such services is lower than that paid to aforementioned officers, they shall be rewarded the difference between the allowance paid at present and allowances mentioned above,” said Hettiarachchi.

Hence, it is apparent that nurses in public service are not entitled to the special allowance paid to executive grade officers only. (Sandun A. Jayasekera)