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| The Armed Forces | | A soldier’s worth | | Purnia S Tripathi | 9/18/2013 9:02:51 PM |
| The government continues to deny both serving and retired soldiers their rightful pay and perks and has quietly buried a Fifth Pay Commission study which found that they had a much lower life expectancy than their civilian counterparts.
EVEN as the country watched soldiers of the Indian Army putting their lives on the line during the arduous rescue operations in flood-hit Uttarakhand in June, a couple of elderly defence veterans were making the rounds of the Army Headquarters and the offices of the Defence Ministry in New Delhi, hoping to meet either the Defence Minister or the Chief of the Army Staff. They hoped to draw the attention of the authorities to the fact that the pay and perks of serving soldiers (all ranks, including officers and sepoys) and the post-retirement benefits of ex-servicemen were pitiable.
The two men were Maj Gen (retd) Satbir Singh, acting chairman of the Indian Ex Servicemen Movement (IESM), and Maj Gen (retd) Surjit Singh. They had a committee report to back their claim that soldiers were given a raw deal. The committee, headed by Maj Gen Surjit Singh, was formed by the Army’s Pay Commission cell to deduce the life expectancy of soldiers for finalising their pay, perks and age of superannuation for the Fifth Central Pay Commission. The committee’s report was prepared in consultation with the Institute of Applied Manpower Research (IAMR). The report, which was confidential, never got acted upon despite the then Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s assurance that it would be given due consideration. While the Fifth Pay Commission was benevolent to Central government employees, defence personnel got a raw deal. This led to a lot of heartburning among defence personnel. Internally, they continued to try and push the government to remedy the situation, but it proved futile. “Now we have decided to make this report public and highlight the unfair treatment meted out to soldiers by successive governments,” said Satbir Singh.
Dying earlier
The findings of the report, titled “A critique of the military pension”, are indeed startling. Taking a big enough sample size of various categories of veterans from pension disbursing banks, zila sainik boards and EME records, the Army cell came to the conclusion that the life expectancy was 72.5 years for officers, 67 for junior commissioned officers (JCOs) and between 59.6 and 64 years for other ranks. The study found that among personnel of other ranks, soldiers possessing saleable skills tended to live longer. The overall conclusion was that on an average a soldier lived only 15 to 20 years after retirement, irrespective of his age at the time of retirement.
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