Officer shortage in the Indian Army - barking up the wrong trees

Both the BJP as well as the Congress agree on the OROP for ex-servicemen. And the topic has motivated not just passionate dharnas (!) by ex servicemen, but also serving and ex-service chiefs to to wade into the debate...

OROP is presented as the panacea for all ills afflicting the defence forces, especially the problem of the 24% officer shortage.

It seems OROP, along with increasing the numbers of general staff officers (colonels, brigadiers, generals of all stars and bars!) will motivate more youth to join the services. The latter has been done - the AV Singh Committee report has been accepted in toto...As a result, the Indian Army will probably have more general staff officers than the US military! Already, all infantry battalions are commanded by Colonels (compared to Lt cols earlier and in other armies), all fighter squadrons by Wing Cos, many ships by Commodores...With this, the trend will only hasten the "greying" of the officer profile...

The fact is that both OROP, as well as a few hundred more general staff posts are not going to ameliorate the fundamental issue - attracting the youth of today in a competitive job market towards a career in the services....Given the state of the budget though (alredy about 17-18% of the Union Budget goes towards defence, and this does not include defence pension), so the scope for simply attracting more by increasing salaries is limited.A better option would be for an exapnded, restructured SSC cadre, with golden handshakes after 5 years. The idea would be to have a leaner Permanent Cadre (PC), and an expanded SSC to take care of the numbers shortage...Economicaly, some very rough broad level analysis..

The expanded SSC-leaner PC model has the following sources of "cost saves" that can be used to increase the benefits for the PC corps:

1. Lower overall pension bill

2. Lower benefits and other infrastructure costs, as many of this is for the benefit of the PC corps only

3. Lower "numbers" of PC offiicers @ Col rank and above

We have only minimal data available, so a very exhaustive analysis is a bit tricky, but an attempt to gauge the potential through an estimation of the first point only (pension bills).

total pension bill of the services: 15244 crores (Source: Union Budget 2008-09)

Officer Corps as a % of total personnel: (about 3.1% estimated) (Source: about 40k officers out of 1.3 Million personnel)

% of pension accruing to the officer corps: estimated @ 7.5% (slightly more than doubel their contribution of nos)

Total officer pension bill: 1143 crores

Current serving officer-to-pensioner ration: 1.68 - taken at the same level as the serving personnel to pensioner ratio (source)

Equilibrium state serving officer-to-pensioner ratio: 1 (estimating a steady state ration of 60% SSC corps officers)
total no of PC officers: 16000 (40% of total officer corps)

% decline in officer pension commitment: 40%

Pension savings: 463 crores

Incremental available/PC officer: 2.9 lacs (approx)

This is a very crude approximation, based on available numbers on one count. There will be other savings (and expenses) of carrying out this exercise. But an incremental pool available of 3 lacs per officer, based on CURRENT COSTS (extending this into the future, which is when the steady state will come about, will yield much bigger numbers), is not a bad start!