Prices are rising but at least  the central government staff and pensioners will have some cushion against it. The union cabinet on Friday revised dearness allowance and relief by eight percent with retrospective effect from January 1. This is in addition to the existing rate of 27 percent of basic pay and pension and represents two per cent more than the last installment of DA and DR.

An official announcement said the increase is in accordance with the accepted formula of the Sixth Central Pay Commission. It would cost the taxpayer Rs 6,969.36 crores per year, though for 2010-11 the figure would be Rs 8,131.20 crores because of the retrospective effect.

Among other cabinet decisions:

Commonwealth Games
The cabinet also sanctioned Rs 687.06 crores for high-end overlays for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi to set high standards of technological excellence matching the benchmarks set by Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006 and Beijing Olympics 2008.

Overlays are temporary fittings, fixtures and equipment to make ready the competition, training and non-competition venues operationally ready for the Games. The mega international event slated from October 3 to 14 in 17 sporting disciplines required 23 competition venues and 26 practice venues, besides a score of non-sports venues like Games village, international brodcasting centre, main press centre, games family home, central warehouse and logistic control centres and Games operation centre.

Friday's special sanction for overlays is for temporary fittings and fixtures required only during the Games and will be removed from the venues immediately after the Games. These shall be operational about one month prior to the Games that is by end of August. Overlay works start in June.

AIIMS Budget
The cabinet also more than trebled sanctions for setting up six new All India Institutes of Medical Sciences and upgradation of 13 other government medical colleges under Phase I. As against the earlier sanction of Rs 3,975.99 crores by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, the Cabinet provided Rs 9307.62 crores more. The goal is to provide tertiary healthcare facilities in and around their location and adjoining districts and states.

Officials said six new AIIMS-standard institutions will be ready by the end of 2012. These are located at Jodhpur, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Raipur and Rishikesh (Uttarakhand). Simultaneous upgradation of the existing institutions to come at par with AIIMS covers Grants Medical College, Mumbai, B J Medical College, Ahmedabad, Government Medical Colleges at Trivandrum, Salem, Bangalore, Kolkata, Jammu and Srinagar, NIMS, Hyderabad; SGPGIMS, Lucknow, RIMS, Ranchi, IMS, BHU, Varanasi and SVIMS, Tirupati.

Police University
Meanwhile, the cabinet dropped a 2008 proposal to set up a national police university as it decided that better would be to conduct courses on police-related subjects by networking the existing universities.

National Population Register

Work to establish the National Population Register, the unique mechanism in the world to record biometric particulars of the entire populace, will start in April this year and is expected to complete by September.

Giving a go-ahead to this today, Union Cabinet earmarked Rs 3539.24 crore for the mammoth exercise to cover 1.2 billion people which is aimed at better delivery of services and enhance national security.

The exercise will involve creation of a digital database, identification details along with photographs, finger-prints and biometrics, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters after the Cabinet meeting.

Once completed, the data will be sent to the Unique Identification Authority which is going to issue unique identification numbers to all, she said.

National Population Register (NPR) is the first-ever attempt to create a comprehensive identity database in the country under which the cards, each costing Rs 28, would be given to people.

Under NPR, government will have comprehensive data of all residents aged 15 years and above. There will be no caste-based enumeration in the census.

Children below the age of 15 years would be added to the parents card, the sources said.

The enumeration exercise, involving 2.5 million government employees, will cover all 35 states and Union Territories and the country's 1.2 billion citizens living in 7,742 towns, 6,08,786 villages and 24 crore households.

Home Minister P Chidambaram had recently asked district magistrates posted along Indo-Bangladesh border to guard against people from across the boundary trying to enroll their names in NPR.

The creation of a national population register might usher in an era of register-based census in the country and help have the estimates of population on a real time basis by combining it with the system of registration of births and deaths in the country.