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| Has Army failed to attract fresh blood? | | Armed Forces don't get urban middle classes' support | |
B L KAK
NEW DELHI, NOV 18
The urban middle classes in India have not accepted the idea of sending their young to the Armed Forces in adequate numbers. The Indian Army's failure to attract fresh blood has been a fact for a long time. An ambitious image correction drive, which was by its very nature a rather cost intensive affair, has simply failed to take off.
A spate of recent films may have invested the uniform with glamour. But in actual fact, the urban middle classes have been found unwilling to send their young to the Armed Forces in large numbers. Figures tell their own story: Army is about a quarter short of its perceived strength in the categories of lieutenants, captains and majors. The shortage is at its most acute in the rank of major and below.
The usual reasons are cited to explain away the problem: Poor service conditions coupled with limited career prospects. There is a surplus of officers at the levels of colonel, brigadier and above and an alarming shortfall at the cuting edge of majors and captains. This information is contained in a none-too-old report of the Defence Ministry.
It shows that there is a shortfall of 3659 officers at the major level and 9009 shortfall at the captain and lieutenant level. The report reveals a top-heavy Army with fewer numbers of youth signing up to become officers. Officers above the rank of colonel are in excess, particularly in the fighting arm, while there is a negligible shortage in the logistic branch.
Figures reveal that there is an overall shortage of over 13,000 offiers in the ranks of lientenats aptains and majors. A fact that is worrying the Army because recent operations have revealed that the brunt of the fighting is borne by young officers. In the 1999 Kargil operations, commanding officers of two batalions had to be sent back due to health ailments induced by their age.
At the level of policy planners, not enough attention has been paid to the relatively recent phenomenon of several young officers preferring to quit the forces rather than continue amid a spectre of uncertainty and stagnation. It was suggested quite some while ago that the very real problem of stagnation could be tackled if the paramilitarty forces were to be encouraged into providing lateral employment avenues to those stagnating within the conventional Armed Forces.
Indeed, the early units of the Border Security Force (BSF) comprised personel drawn from the existing Armed Services. Intelligent perspective planning would have ensured this became an abiding trend. But in subsequent years, the story has turned out to be quite different. What is required is a system of institutionalised incentives which an offset the fear of stagnation.
The other possibility, which has already been tried quite successfully in the context of units like Rashtriya Rifles, is to recruit directly into counter-insurgency operations. There has to be a a serious departure from conventional thinking because that has clearly failed in addressing itself to the widely held belief that officers in the Indian Adminstrative Service (IAS) are a more privileged lot than their counterpart in the Armed Forces. |
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