Army's Future: Lean, Mean and Tech- Driven

By reducing troops and restructuring its combat-noncombat branches, the Indian Army is in for a major overhaul

- ​​​​​​​pradip R. Sagar

The Indian Armed forces is bulging and greying.

That is partially owing to what it first thought would make the services attractive to young talent. Following repeated representations by the armed forces, the Union government substantially raised salaries and perks of its personnel through multiple pay commissions and the recent One Rank, One Pension policy. This, however, has led to a problem of plenty, as even officers who have been superseded during promotion are not leaving the force. Earlier though, such officers would opt for early retirement rather than work under junior officers. According to the Army headquarters, the number of officers who took premature retirement after being superseded every year came down to 170 from around 300 in the last two years. Thus, the Army has more senior officers and fewer vacancies.

Also, owing to ballooning salaries and pension bills, the government has no money for modernisation of the defence forces. While the ideal ratio between revenue and capital expenditure in the defence budget should be 60:40, it is 83:17 now. For instance, in this year’s defence budget, the Army’s revenue expenditure (salaries, excluding pensions) was 1,28,076 crore, while the capital allocation for modernisation was only 26,688 crore.