Over the past few months lot of bloggers, journalists have been blaming the army for carrying out a sustained media campaign asking for higher pay and have been suggesting that a pay hike is not the solution to the army’s problem. The view propagated by such critics is that there are a lot of other factors like colonial mindset, top brass incompetency etc and the paltry pay that the army receives is only a small problem. There are other major issues that the army must deal with first before creating such a hue and cry about pay-scales.
Yes there are multiple factors affecting the army but the most important is inadequate compensation. To explain my point further we have to look at three groups of people who this issue of paltry pay-scales affects the most :
(1) A young boy who is considering the armed forces as a career. Such a boy loves the army lifestyle, sees himself donning the uniform, leading a life of adventure, and challenges and risks.
But then he sees his classmate who doesn’t go to iim…..but to an average management college earning twice or thrice of what he will be earning, will be leading a comfortable, stable family life. All this passion for the forces just doesn’t seem to be worth it and thus, the army loses out on candidates with the right qualities.
(2) This group consists of officers who are have spent about 7-15 years in the army .This is a lot which is the most dissatisfied. They are people who are now seeing their classmates in the corporate sector drawing double their salaries. Living a comfortable stable family lives. And this officer is wondering how wrong his decision of joining the forces was, not because he’s not liking his army career, but because he has worked really hard in the past 10 yrs, fought militants in various parts of the country and now when he looks back for all that hard work, he’s being paid peanuts, not having a stable family life and various other reasons. This way u have a set very dissatisfied middle level officers which is not good for any organization
(3) This group consists of officers who have worked very hard for 20 years and are the bright stars of theirs batches. These guys who are genuine hard workers and talented individuals now feel that whatever they have achieved at the end of the day their paycheck doesn’t compensate them for the responsibilities and the work pressure they are handling. They can easily move to the civilian sector lead comfortable and any day less pressurizing lives……end result army losing out on its to be next generation of military leaders.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the army loses out in the above cases because of inadequate compensation it is offering for the challenging career .
Another reason why only the armed forces are making such hue and cry about salaries is simple. Any other government service IAS/IPS/Group A Services officers enjoy a comfortable no pressure government job where whether u work or u don’t it doesn’t make a difference. Secondly, it is known fact all major government organization/departments organized corruption exists which is an easy source of extra income plus even if u get caught rarely anything happens. Now compare this with the army more than half of the army is deployed in counter insurgency ops at any given point of time. Most officers spent every alternate posting in field areas. Being in the army is generally a damn pressured career and army’s zero error syndrome further complicates the matter
And as far as corruption as a source of extra income is concerned, does exist but is minimal compared to other government services. And if someone in he army gets caught, he faces stern punishment (rarely ever happens in other government organizations).
The most important problem facing the army is to be able to attract the right kind of young men to join the army and exodus of serving officers .The most important factor to solve these problems is to ensure adequate compensation to these men for the tough lives they lead.
