Bhaskar Khulbe highest paid officer in Prime Minister's Office

The monthly salary of all officers working in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has been made public as part of suo motu disclosure under the RTI Act with senior IAS officer Bhaskar Khulbe the highest paid at Rs 2.01 lakh.

Khulbe, who is Secretary to the Prime Minister, gets a monthly remuneration of Rs 2.01 lakh, according to details of the salary as on June one, 2016 put on the PMO website.

Nripendra Mishra, Principal Secretary to the PM, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and P K Mishra, Additional Principal Secretary to Modi get Rs 1,62,500 per month, plus pension, each. All these top bureaucrats are retired civil servants.

Six Joint Secretaries in the PMO--Tarun Bajaj, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, T V Somanathan, A K Sharma, Anurag Jain and Debashree Mukherjee--get a monthly salary ranging between Rs 1.55 lakh and Rs 1.77 lakh, it said.

Rajeev Topno and Sanjeev Kumar Singla, both private secretaries to the PM, get a monthly salary of Rs 1.46 lakh and Rs 1.38 lakh respectively.

Sharat Chander, Information Officer, and J M Thakkar, Public Relations Officer in the PMO, get a monthly remuneration of Rs 1.26 lakh and Rs 99,000, respectively, according to the PMO website.

Five other bureaucrats including the PM's close aide Sanjay R Bhavsar, working as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the PMO, draws monthly remuneration of around Rs 1.1 lakh, it said.

Besides Bhavsar, four other OSDs are Hiren Joshi, Pratik Doshi, Hemang Jani and Ashutosh Narayan Singh.

The PMO has also made public details of monthly remuneration given to Secretary to former Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

N C Jhingta, Secretary to Vajpayee, gets Rs 1.42 lakh while G Muralidhar Pillay, Singh's Secretary, draws monthly remuneration of Rs one lakh (plus pension), the PMO said.

These disclosures have been made under Section 4 of the Right to Information(RTI) Act that casts an obligation on all public authorities to suo motu disclose, among others, details of remuneration given to all its employees for the sake of transparency.