Union Government Announces Terms of Reference for 8th Pay Commission; INDIA Bloc Bihar Makes a Slew of Electoral Promises in Bihar; Cloud Seeding in Delhi to Combat Pollution

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Snapshot of the day

October 28, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

More than nine months after it approved the implementation of the 8th Pay Commission, the Union government today announced the terms of reference under which the panel will function. Without a ToR, which charts out the scope of a pay commission’s work and spells out the areas in which it must make recommendations, the body has lacked official recognition, Jocelyn Fernandes reports. The commission, which is to comprise former Supreme Court Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai as chair, IIM Bangalore professor Pulak Ghosh as part-time member and petroleum secretary Pankaj Jain as member-secretary, will revise the salaries, allowances and pensions of current and former Union government employees. Workers’ unions had been increasingly worried about the delay in appointments to the present commission, which will make its recommendations within a year and a half of being constituted.

In their joint manifesto titled ‘Bihar ka Tejashwi pran’, the state’s INDIA bloc parties have made promises focussing on employment, youth, women and the extremely backward classes. Some promises had been announced earlier, such as a government job for every family and up to 200 units’ worth electricity free of charge. Other pledges include curtailing paper leaks and exam irregularities, tabling a legislation targeting atrocities against EBCs, setting up IT parts and special economic zones, and not implementing the Waqf Amendment Act. During the bloc’s press conference releasing the manifesto today, its CM face Tejashwi Yadav accused the NDA of making a “puppet” of Nitish Kumar and of “only using his face” before the elections. Sravasti Dasgupta reports.

In rural Bihar, Sobhana Nair finds that Prashant Kishor “remains an untested variable voters are not willing to waste their votes on”. In the state’s cities, on the other hand, the Jan Suraaj Party chief’s “pitch has found some resonance”, “especially [among] those looking for options beyond the NDA but [who] are uncomfortable voting for the Mahagatbandhan”.

Meanwhile, the Indian Express has discovered that Kishor is a voter not only in his home district of Rohtas in Bihar but also in Kolkata, where his listed address is the same building that contains the Trinamool Congress’s headquarters. While Kishor did not respond to the newspaper, a member of his team said he enrolled himself as a voter ahead of the 2021 West Bengal assembly election – for which he served Trinamool as a consultant – and that he had applied to delete his voter ID there.

In a first-of-its-kind effort to combat rising air pollution, Indian authorities on Tuesday carried out