The
still unresolved, one rank one pension agitation has exacerbated the lack of
trust between the military, on the one hand, and politicians and bureaucrats,
on the other. In a double defeat for the government, it will pay out at least
Rs 18,000-22,000 crore for a settlement, but still leave most ex-servicemen
grumbling.
The Government has accepted the
demands of our veterans, by granting One Rank One Pension. The Veterans too
withdrew their hunger strike but are continuing with their agitation, because
they feel their is a difference between what they wanted and what they were
offered.
“We are going to scale up the
agitation. There will be a series of rallies in Bihar, Punjab and Haryana, and
a major rally in Delhi on December 13 if the issue is not resolved,” Major
General Satbir Singh (retd.), who has been spearheading the agitation, told
IANS.
So, What exactly is the
problem? Mr.Ajay Shukla, Business Standard,
has this analysis to point
out :
The still unresolved, one rank one
pension (OROP) agitation has exacerbated the lack of trust between the
military, on the one hand, and politicians and bureaucrats, on the other. In a
double defeat for the government, it will pay out at least Rs 18,000-22,000
crore for a settlement, but still leave most ex-servicemen grumbling. That is
because the government has misunderstood the nature of the One Rank One Pension
agitation: it is less a demand for money than an expression of outrage at being
discriminated against vis-à-vis the cordially disliked Indian Administrative
Service (IAS). Many veterans have told me they would accept the status quo on
pensions, provided OROP benefits are also withdrawn from the IAS and the Indian
Foreign Service (IFS).
But the tiger has tasted blood,
given the strong media and public support during the OROP agitation. Already
another (morally and logically justifiable) demand is taking shape with armed
forces discussion groups buzzing with another long-standing grievance bearing
the clumsy moniker of “non-functional upgradation”. NFU, which the government
has denied the military, was granted to numerous Group-A central services like
the Defence Research & Development Service, Border Roads Organisation,
Indian Ordnance Factory Service, et al. It is only a matter of time before the
NFU demand is raised more strongly.
In simple terms, NFU means that when
an IAS officer from a particular batch (a batch includes everyone who joins
service the same year) is promoted to a certain rank (say deputy secretary),
all her batchmates from Group-A central services automatically start drawing
the pay scale of deputy secretary two years after her promotion. This continues
all the way up the line. The term NFU implies that, even as those officials
continue to discharge their earlier functions, they are upgraded to the higher
pay grade of their IAS batchmate. Effectively this means that every central
services officer makes it to top pay grades, albeit with a two-year time lag
behind the IAS.
You might wonder why the IAS, which
safeguards its own interests well by virtue of making the rules, has not
awarded itself NFU cover. That is because it does not need it; every IAS
officer anyway reaches the government’s highest grade of pay, called the “apex
scale”, which brings in a salary of Rs 80,000 a month. Even when an IAS officer
fails to get empanelled for promotion by the Centre, she continues getting
time-scale promotions in her state cadre. When she reaches the rank of
“additional chief secretary” in the state cadre, which all of them
automatically do, she enters the apex scale. The IFS benefits from a similar
system.
Military officers deeply resent the
fact that the IAS and IFS keep getting promoted, regardless of merit and
performance. Furthermore, the IAS wrangled an order after the 6th Pay
Commission that officials drawing salaries in the apex scale would be
automatically entitled to OROP. This means that, as successive pay commissions
revise the apex scale, as the 7th Pay Commission is currently doing, their pensions
would rise in sync. However, 99 per cent of military officers do not make it to
the apex scale. For them, each pay commission would separately determine
smaller pension raises.
The double benefit to the IAS and
IFS – i.e., apex scale salaries for all, and OROP for all – is doubly
infuriating to the military, whose exceptionally steep promotion pyramid allows
only a minuscule percentage of officers to reach the apex scale. Of a hundred
army, navy or air force officers in a batch, only 30-40 are selected for
promotion to colonel (or equivalent rank in the navy and air force), 10-12 of
those go on to become brigadiers, four-five become major generals and just one
or two make lieutenant general, where apex scales apply. While the military
deems this rank hierarchy essential, officers believe they must be covered by
NFU, so that those who lose out on promotion do not simultaneously lose out on
salaries and pension.
There are significant and obvious
disadvantages in being excluded from NFU. A major general posted to army
headquarters as an additional director general draws a significantly lower
salary than a civilian director serving directly under him. If the major
general were to retire in his present rank, his pension would be Rs 5,000 lower
than his civilian subordinate, even were the latter to retire on the same date
with less service than the general. Every Group-A central service officer is
assured of retiring in at least the “higher administrative grade” pay scale,
equivalent to the pay grade of a lieutenant general. In comparison, just one
per cent of army officers reach that pay grade.
Yet the defence ministry has flatly
turned down NFU for the armed forces, after the military demanded it in
2009-10. The detailed and convincing case mentioned a range of
employment-related hardships the military faced, including: legally binding
curbs on their fundamental rights, strict disciplinary codes, long separation
from families, truncated careers, stringent promotion criteria, continuous
hazards and threats to life. Furthermore, the grant of NFU to the IPS but not
to the military disturbed the principle of parity between the two that the 3rd,
4th and 5th Pay Commissions had established.
The defence ministry peremptorily
rejected this demand in a one-page note on July 15, 2010. This said the
military’s service conditions were different from those of civilians (hardly
news to the military, which had citing harsher working conditions in their
demand). The ministry argued that the services already got “military service
pay” as compensation for difficult working conditions. Finally, stating the
obvious again, the ministry declared that NFU was for organised Group-A
services, which the military was not. A right-to-information petition later
revealed that no civil servant higher than a joint secretary had considered
this demand, which three service chiefs had vetted and cleared.
As with OROP, the system seems not
to be correcting itself until it is pushed to the wall. The 7th Pay Commission
is unlikely to extend NFU to the armed forces, since members are protesting
that it makes poor economic sense. The army, navy and air force know that is
true but will not countenance everybody getting the benefit except for the one
that deserves it most, by virtue of having by far the highest percentage of
superseded personnel.
The big political question is: what
form will the demand for NFU take? OROP was a pension issue, so pensioners did
the heavy lifting at Jantar Mantar, the protest site in New Delhi. But how will
serving officers demand NFU?
If the central government is
frustrated by these complex and interlinked demands, it must blame the
deplorable creating of exceptions for the IAS. Avay Shukla, a former IAS
officer who blogs on “Hill Post”, noted during the OROP agitation: “The government
consists of scores of departments… There are intricate linkages between them:
the whole structure is like a huge spider web in which all the strands are
inter-connected, and disturbing just one cobweb destabilises the entire
structure.”
With the structure already
disturbed, can the government restore the status quo ante? Finding a new
equilibrium that balances so many actors seems well nigh impossible.
Source: Business Standard
