An army for tomorrow

The scale of the officer shortage is, in itself, alarming. According to some reports, the army faces a shortage of 25 per cent of its authorised strength, the air force 13 per cent and the navy 16 per cent, with most vacancies in junior officers’ ranks. It would be logically hard to explain why a shortage of junior officers does not adversely impact the efficiency of the Indian armed forces. Especially since junior officers have been at the forefront of all operations — from the confusing jungles of Sri Lanka, the insurgencies that dot India’s periphery to the heroic mountains in Kargil, India’s finest have been fighting, dying but winning against impossible odds. Making up for the shortfall should be an operational necessity and not, as it seems, a mere statistic.

However, before suggesting steps to increase officer enrollment, the military has to begin by admitting the failure of ‘feeder institutions’ that were created to increase officer intake in the armed forces. There are 22 Sainik schools, one in most of the major states, five military schools and the venerable Rashtriya Indian Military College (RIMC) that were established mainly to groom future generations of military officers. These residential schools admit students in class VI and, at least on paper, provide them with an education that supposedly imbibes the Orwellian ‘Officer Like Qualities’ making them, ideally, fit to join the National Defence Academy. While exact figures are hard to come by, cursory examinations of websites of the Sainik schools show that barely 1-2 per cent of students make the cut. Why have these schools failed to deliver? As the first Sainik school alumni to be appointed as army chief, General Deepak Kapoor would know more about this than anyone else.

... contd.