New Delhi: The final framework of the controversial Agnipath scheme came about after due consideration, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen. Manoj Pande said Thursday.
“The final framework structure of the Agnipath scheme that came about, it happened after an iterative process and consultations and it took into account whatever issues we had to put across,” Gen. Pande during the annual press conference in New Delhi ahead of Army Day.
The army will celebrate the 76th Army Day on 15 January.
Introduced in June 2022, the Agnipath scheme — also called the Tour of Duty scheme — is the Narendra Modi government’s controversial short-term recruitment scheme for the Indian Army.
Under the policy, soldiers — called ‘Agniveers’ — are recruited for four years, at the end of which only 25 percent of recruits from a batch are retained for regular service. The policy drew massive protests across India in 2022.
Gen. Pande’s remarks came after former army chief M. M. Naravane, in upcoming his memoir ‘Four Stars of Destiny’, reportedly wrote that the Army was “taken by surprise” by the policy, but for the other two services, it came like a “bolt from the blue”.
In his book, which will be officially released on 30 April but excerpts of which have already been released to select media houses, Gen. Naravane has reportedly written that the iteration of the scheme that he proposed to Prime Minister Modi was on the lines of the short-service commission policy already in place for officers.
“Just as a limited number of SSC officers are taken each year, likewise a limited number of jawans would be similarly enrolled and released after the completion of their ‘tour’ with the option of re-enlisting for another tour, if found to be fit,” he writes.
However, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) considered the proposal “on a much wider scope and applicability”, he writes.
“In the PMO formulation, not only should the complete intake of the year be short-service based, but it would also apply to all three services,” he writes. When asked about this, Gen. Pande refused to comment, saying it would be “unfair for me to say anything on that”.
Still speaking about the Agnipath scheme, he said there was a need to move forward.
“The acceptability, the positivity, the ownership, the integration of the Agniveers into the units is happening well,” he said. He also conceded there were a few challenges in terms of training but said that most of them were at a “tactical level”. Dealing with this, he said, would involve tweaking existing policies to deal with a limited training period.
“We are harmonising the physical and firing standards between the Agniveers and regular soldiers,” he said. “These are some of the issues more in the realm of management issues, pay and allowances, which as we are moving forward, (we) are picking the issues from the feedback. This is something which we are successfully able to do within the army at the internal level.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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