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Defending the Indefensible
By Manoj Joshi
In September 2013, in the heat of electioneering, Narendra Modi promised to give retired military personnel the grail they had been seeking for so long: One Rank One Pension (OROP). Initially, he insisted that he would follow up his promise. But two years later, when its implications began to sink in, he began to backpedal and say that, maybe, the
term OROP needed to be defined and that the exservicemen needed to be a bit more patient.
Finally, in September 2015, the government announced that they were implementing the OROP scheme. The problem was that it was OROP only by the government’s own definition.
A commonsense definition of OROP means that all people retiring in the same rank for the same length of service, irrespective of their date of retirement, should get the same pension. So not only does it need to meet the gap between the rates of old pensioners with the new, but also ensure their equalisation whenever there are future enhancements. There is something clearly wrong with the idea of an officer who retired 20 years ago getting the same pension as the one retiring today. Pension is supposed to be related to the salary you get at the time of retirement. Equalising it for a lifetime would be ruinous for the economy, especially if equity demanded that all government servants ought to be pensioned off in the same way.
In that sense the government’s September 2015 scheme of revising the pensions of the armed forces personnel every five years appears to be reasonable.
The real problem lies elsewhere. It is in the fact that GoI has awarded the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) the full and real OROP, which it is denying to most of the
military. The government decided that all those at the topmost scale, the Apex scale, would get the real OROP i. e. their pensions would always match those at the Apex scales even in future revisions.
And surprise, surprise, it turns out that all IAS and Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officers retire at this scale. To aid this skullduggery, the IAS bureaucracy extended the scheme to the seniormost officers of the armed force — the three chiefs, the vice chiefs, army commanders and their equivalent and some senior lieutenant generallevel officers.
So, now, when the broad cross section of retirees demand OROP, the Modi government is backtracking. It is not too difficult to see why.
Defence pensions, which are roughly twice the civilian pensions, are a huge portion of the budget. This year the government has budgeted Rs 82,332 crore for defence pensions alone. Only five years ago in 20102011, this amount was Rs 37,336 crore.
The bureaucrats have argued that if the military is given OROP, others will demand it. Yes, there are other equally demanding professions — the paramilitary, the police, firemen, railwaymen and school teachers in remote areas who can also claim hardship and demand OROP, though most of them retire at 60.
The military is cut up because till 1973, they got OROP, as well as higher pensions to compensate for their early retirement. But since then the IAS has systematically‘civilianised’ the compensation packages to their own advantage and the disadvantage of uniformed personnel.
Actually, the first item in the agenda is for the government to remove OROP that has beengiven to the IAS, IFS and top army officers. This makes mockery of any system of pension and is also unjust to the other mililtary officers and civil servants who toil a lifetime working for the government.
The second item is to set up an entirely different pay commission for the armed forces. Trying to fit the needs of the military with the civil service is like trying to wear a coat with two different sleeve sizes.
This Pay Commission’s mandate must be to find some way to justly compensate the military and, at the same time, keep it young. Today, officers, especially those of the infantry, have often been encouraged to leave after 20 years of service, when they are likely to be 3840. An ordinary jawan retires even earlier, at 34-36.
The third is to mandate the police recruitment boards to hire retiring jawans. A jawan at 34 and he can even be made available at 30 would be an ideal paramilitary or civil policeman. Likewise a young lieutenant colonel or colonel could do well as a superintendent or senior superintendent of police after some training. Government and semigovernment organisations must give first priority of professions like pilots, managers and security offciers to retiring officers.
But the various ministries have baulked at this. Politicians rather coyly say that the military personnel would not be ‘suitable’ for police and other civilian jobs. What they really mean is that they may not be easily amenable to serve their political masters.
Most exservicemen were strong supporters of the Modi government. Today, they are a bewildered lot. The diluted OROP is just one slight. It has been rapidly accompanied by others: reduction in disability pensions, downgrading of military officers relative to their civilian counterparts, and the appointment of civilian officers to engineering posts traditionally held by the military in operational areas.
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