WAGE INDEXATION IN INDIA 71 faic price shops alone are used in the index, rather than taking an average of controlled and open market prices of commodities, in proportion to the ratio of availability from both the markets ; (iii) specification of items included in the index scheme is mostly inferior, even if the commonly consumed varieties are mostly medium and superior ones ; and (iv) the number of items included in tLe i:klcx basket does not include certain important items of mass consumption.4 The authors have marshalled the information regarding dearness allowance payments from various private industry groups of the major producing areas of the country, as also from governments and public sector units, to prove that this component in the wage costs has assumed alarming proportion, in the entire economy. According to the information gathered by the authors, dearness allowance as a proportion of basic wages in the private corporate sector has gone up from about 60 per cent in 1979 to more than 120 per cent by 1983. In public sector undertakings and government, the problem is not only the rising dearness allowance but also the distortion of wage structure caused by full neutralisation of wages against inflation for lower level workers in contrast to partial neutralisation for top level officials. If this trend continues, the authors estimate that, by the turn of this century the total amount of money required to meet the dearness allowance of the central government alone would work out to Rs. 15,710 crore, which represents an increase of 700 per cent over the payments in 1982-83. Interestingly enough, while examining the dearness allowance structure in the private organised sector, the authors find that only 44 per cent of the units belonging to food manufacturing, chemicals, paper and paper products, textiles, tyres, cigarettes, cement, engineering, etc., pay dearness allowance to their workers (Table-1, Chapter IV). In the remaining 56 per cent of these industries the workers are paid fixed wages, without being 'indexed' for the changes in the costs of living. The authors do not seem to. have anything to say about this. What they are actually worried about is the fast movement of dearness allowance and its predominence over basic wages. Anybody who has some knowledge about the wage policy in India is aware that wage revisions take place in various sectors once in four to fourteen years. Between two wage revisions, the dearness allowance, wherever payable, has to go up in most cases above the levels of basic wages under the existing trend of inflation. But if it has moved faster than the costs of living, the authors could have been justified. However, neither their data nor the data officially available elsewhere substantiate this contention. For example, the per capita emoluments of the public sector employees in relation to average all India consumer price index (1960 ==100) is available on a time series basis from 1970-71 to 1985-86.5 During this period when the emoluments in the public sector went up by 37.5 per cent at 1960 prices, the consumer price index increased by 246.7 per cent. SU11 the authors raise