Letter from New Delhi:India has doubled President Pratibha Patil's annual pay packet to Rs1.2 million (€20,426), a modest hike compared with the Rs225 million it costs each year to maintain her in a largely ceremonial post, writes Rahul Bedi
The salaries of the equally ceremonial vice-president and provincial governors, all of whom maintain lavish lifestyles in grandiloquent residences manned by scores of liveried staff, were also increased substantially by the federal cabinet headed by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, last week.
While the vice-president, M Hamid Ansari, who performs the legislative function of heading parliament's Rajya Sanbha or Upper House will receive Rs85,000 a month - up from Rs45,000 - the monthly salary of state governors has been more than doubled to Rs75,000. The annual pension of India's two retired presidents has been doubled to Rs600,000, in addition to the lavish housing and personal staff they are routinely provided at great expense upon retirement. Additional facilities have also been sanctioned for the spouses of deceased presidents and vice-presidents.
"The establishment takes good care of its own, cossetting them in luxury and grandeur in a largely poverty-ridden society," former MP and well-known newspaper columnist Kuldip Nayar said.
The emoluments it pays its public servants may not be overly large or lavish compared with the private sector, but the privileges that go with the job are simply unbelievable, he added.
All senior Indian officials - unlike their western counterparts - are sumptuously cossetted by the State in regal bungalows set in massive lawns and all serviced by State-paid household staff. In many instances, large fleets of expensive cars accompanied by elaborate security details are part of the package.
Consider the Indian president's perquisites. Her 340 decorated-room, red sandstone residence designed by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyen's and built initially as the colonial governor general's seat in the 1930s, is akin to a mini-township that costs Rs70 million a year to maintain.
The annual salary bill for its vast secretarial staff, almost all provided with large bungalows, and personal staff, is a staggering Rs60 million.
Set on 330 acres, the presidential estate boasts of a private golf course, polo ground, innumerable tennis courts, a hospital and school for children of the household staff in addition to a bakery, a modern cinema hall and an elaborate swimming pool-cum-squash court complex.
The annual allocation for its 900-odd liveried staff is Rs21.6 million while Rs20 million is meant for the gardens - which includes the exquisite 13-acre Mughal wing - and Rs640,000 for hospitality.
Twenty-five chefs cater to the presidential staff, of which two are exclusively dedicated to the first citizen's culinary indulgences.
The estate's yearly laundry bill is a whopping Rs1.8 million. The president's bodyguards, as its colourfully accoutered cavalrymen are known, sends its remuda for "summering" to a specially designated estate in Dehra Dun, 300km east of Delhi to spare its polo ponies the capital's searing temperatures during the hot months.
The president also has a summer house in the former imperial capital Shimla in the Himalayas north of Delhi and a residence in Hyderabad in the south which together cost about Rs15 million to maintain.
In short, the Socialist Republic's presidential trappings are somewhat akin to those of former viceroys. The provincial governors sustain less expansive, but equally well-appointed lifestyles that in a way mirror the president's. Such incongruity is ironic in a country that is home to a third of the world's poorest and for whom social and economic security is not even a mirage.
A recent national family health survey backed by Unicef, for instance, revealed that almost 46 per cent of the country's children under three were undernourished.
Another report by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector showed that at least 86 per cent of working Indians earn less than Rs20 - or just under half a US dollar - a day, despite the blistering growth of the nation's economy that remains second only to China's.
According to the report Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector, only 0.4 per cent of workers in India employed in agriculture, construction, weaving and fishing had access to any form of social security.
"No social security, pitiable working conditions, extreme poverty, no education, acute gender discrimination, and absent or poorly implemented laws - this is what India's workers live by," senior government official Arjun Sengupta and author of the report said.
Rapidly increasing economic disparities alongside large-scale corruption and maladministration too were negatively impinging on India's burgeoning population of over 1 billion estimated to increase to more than 1.3 billion by 2020.
But somehow this brutal reality remains incidental: so long as the republic's successive presidents continue to be maintained in the opulence to which they have become accustomed.