How any peons does the Prime Minister need? According to the PMO website, 111. At present, 45 posts are waiting to be filled. In addition, there are 12 senior peons as well, of which six positions are vacant. The sanctioned staff of the PMO is 524—it has 407 members on the rolls right now. In his bid to beat his own colleagues on the transparency index, the PMO has ironically shown that austerity is not a virtue.
As if 111 peons are not enough, the PMO also has 15 daftaries, or office boys, to do the heavy lifting such as taking papers from one official to another. Eight posts are vacant for the time being. Four farash-es, or doorkeeper’s posts are sanctioned out of which two are on duty.
Four photostat operators are on the standby. The mighty wheels of babudom do not turn without clerks; the PMO has a sanctioned strength of 45 upper division clerks and 28 lower division clerks. Forty-one of the former and 12 of the latter are hard at work in the PMO.
There are eight stenographers as well. Apart from the support staff above to serve VIPs from principal secretary to the PM to the National Security Adviser (18 including six joint secretaries), there are 23 section officers and 38 private secretaries (two vacancies as of now). To bolster their efforts is an army of 72 assistants; 62 posts have been filled so far. There are 42 sanctioned posts of personal assistants as well, of which 33 have been filled. But there is only one librarian, one accountant and one personal assistant in the PMO. Of 28 drivers, 23 posts have been filled. The PMO’s monthly expenditure statement for 2012-2013, reveals it cost `2,12,92592 to run the Prime Minister’s Office.
The salaries for the lower posts are better than in the private sector. For peons, the range is from Rs 19,000 to Rs 28,000 a month. For daftaris, it is Rs 21,000 to Rs 26,000. Attenders and helpers are in the Rs 15,000 to Rs 26,000 range depending on seniority.
Ironically, upper division clerks who are several steps senior make between Rs 19,000 to Rs 28,000 a month. Stenos are paid between Rs 19,000 to Rs 38,000 per month. Incidentally, no other Ministry has posted such information on its website.
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