Unearned privilege

The root cause of OROP frictions

There is little doubt that civil-military relations in India are not at their best. This is, in fact, the disturbing subtext to the one rank, one pension (OROP) agitation, which succeeded last weekend in wringing a concession from the government. The implementation of OROP, as this newspaper has argued, is a grievous error from the point of view of sustainable finances. The question, of course, is how matters have been allowed to reach this point. The answer goes back decades. The Third Pay Commission (TPC), for example, is a favourite complaint of OROP campaigners. In 1973, while implementing the commission's recommendations for pension entitlement, Indira Gandhi's government essentially equalised the proportion of last-drawn salary paid to civilian and military employees of the government at 50 per cent. And the TPC did do away with a "standard rate" pension for servicemen, but this was in order to grant the services' demand that the length of qualifying service should also determine the receipt of a higher pension, not just final rank.

Any uneasy parity that existed was broken, thanks to sleight of hand by the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Though OROP was not a principle anywhere in the Indian government, the IAS essentially introduced the principle decades after the TPC for those paid on the "apex scale". This was the pay of secretary-level IAS officers, as well as of special secretaries, equivalents in the Indian Foreign Service, and the top uniformed brass, such as army commanders and above. The inequity thus introduced is the root cause of the uniformed service's anger. But such distrust among the military of a democracy for the civilian leadership is dangerous. The military should note that it has special privileges that do not accrue to the civilian employees of the government. Necessities and luxuries at subsidised 'canteen' prices for life, for example. As with all such perquisites, these privileges should now be monetised. Perhaps OROP can be funded by the sale of extensive military club-land, reserved for officers, in the middle of some of India's most expensive cities. The armed forces should also be encouraged to curtail its huge civilian manpower needs that largely meet non-official requirements of their senior officers.

Still, the IAS, the decision-makers in this case, have only themselves to blame. By favouring themselves through the "apex scale", they seriously destabilised civil-military relations. This is just another example of how the IAS has quietly decided to reward itself with more and more perquisites. It builds vast mansions for itself in the middle of one of India's most congested cities. It has decided that its officers deserve medical care anywhere in the world if they want, and have granted travel and stay in the location of that care for the officer and a companion. Such preference for itself is naturally going to impress other government cadres as the arrogance of power. A correction of this behaviour is overdue. The next pay commission should take into account the tendency of the IAS to add to its own privileges. Instead of perquisites and pensions, the IAS, and other leading services, should be moved to a monetisation of current perquisites. Instead of housing, a housing allowance; instead of health privileges, contributory health insurance. Ending unearned privilege would help repair civil-military relations.