Telangana’s monthly salary and pension bill has surged four-fold in a decade to around Rs 6000 crore and according to state chief secretary K Ramakrishna Rao, the spike comes amid top government engineers in power utilities drawing up to Rs 7 lakh per month, while senior sanitation workers in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) earning close to Rs 2 lakh a month after long years of service and revisions.

Rao said that salary and pensions of workers have expanded 300 per cent due to successive pay revisions, which also clashed with election cycles and led to a surge in expenditures.