Telangana pays highest salaries to govt employees; junior lineman’s ₹52,000 entry level salary increases to ₹1.91 lakh after 2 decades

Telangana offers the highest government salaries, with junior linemen earning up to ₹1.91 lakh after two decades of service.

Telangana holds the distinction of being the State where the Government employees get the highest salaries even as it braces up for the challenging task of considering the recommendations of the Pay Revision Commission (PRC) headed by retired bureaucrat N. Siva Sankar.

The State is on a par with the Central Government, implementing a minimum basic salary of ₹19,000 for the new entrants into the lowest cadre and the amount significantly grows along with the number of years of service put in by the respective employees. The staff at the lowest level in government departments get a salary of ₹50,000 at the entry level. This is much higher in power utilities where the lowest cadre, like junior linemen, draws a salary of over ₹52,000 at the entry level, and around ₹1.91 lakhs for those with service of more than two decades.

The high salaries are on account of the implementation of the previous PRC headed by retired bureaucrat C.R. Biswal. The State Government is incurring huge expenditure on payment of salaries/wages and pensions to the staff at different levels every month.

According to provisional figures submitted to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the State Government’s expenditure on account of salaries and pensions (committed expenditure) till January this fiscal [2025-26] has gone up to ₹55,575 crore (₹39,858 crore salaries and ₹15,717 crore pensions) constituting 21.09% of the revenue expenditure with two more months to go for the completion of the fiscal year.

Coupled with the interest payment, constituting another key area of the committed expenditure, the outgo from the State exchequer accounts to over 40% of the revenue expenditure. This is likely to rise further owing to the recruitments made to vacant posts in different departments in the last two years.

The salaries of the employees of the power utilities Generation and Transmission Corporations and Distribution Companies are much higher as compared with the State Government staff. For instance, the monthly basic salary for a junior lineman in the Transmission Corporation of Telangana starts from ₹24,340 and that of higher grade officers of the rank of superintendent engineers and chief engineers is around ₹1.12 lakh indicating the huge difference in the pay scales of staff of the State Government departments and power utilities.