Tour of Duty announcement to take more time, sub-committees set up

There have been reservations from the three services on the affect that the short contractual service for jawans will have on the efficacy of the services, especially in branches which deal with technical trained manpower. In these branches (arms and services) such as Engineers, Signals, Artillery, Air Defence, Armoured Corps, EME, Ordnance and many more, extensive technical training is required which takes several years. However, under the Tour of Duty scheme, as per details in the public domain, 25 per cent of the intake of soldiers will be eased out of service after 3 years and another 25 per cent at the end of 5 years, including their training period.

There are fears that such rapid turnover of soldiers will be detrimental to the efficiency of the branches and trades in which they serve. The same holds true for the Navy and the Air Force too as they have even more specialised branches in which personnel often deal with highly sophisticated equipment which require many years of training.

It is believed that while the higher echelons of the government have noted these concerns, and accordingly set up sub-committees to address them, there is no change in the belief that the Tour of Duty concept of recruitment is the way ahead.

It has also been pointed out that the idea of Tour of Duty had come from the Army itself when a similar scheme of contractual services was proposed for officers. The brainchild of a now retired senior Army officer, the idea was seized upon by the bureaucracy and instead improved and sought to be implemented for the recruitment of jawans so that substantial financial savings were made by way of salaries and pensions. The financial savings by way of the original proposal for officers was negligible by comparison.

Regardless of these fears and re-assessments over the new concept, the new recruitment process is expected to begin in a few weeks time to ease the dilemma of the youth who are eager to don the uniform.

17 Brigs and Maj Gens shortlisted for Director, MRSAFPI

The post of director, Maharaja Ranjit Singh Armed Forces Preparatory Institute (MRSAFPI), Mohali, has been vacant for the past several months. There has been an ad-hoc arrangement in place and the process of selection of a new director got delayed due to the Punjab Assembly elections and the imposition of the code of conduct.

An official who is privy to the selection process revealed that the advertisement for the post was issued before the model code was imposed but the process got held up due to polls and the formation of a new government. It is also learnt that the criteria for selection of the director has been tweaked to include desirability of the officer having served in a selection centre of the three services. This was not the case with the earlier appointment as it is not the mandate of the director to be conducting the training himself. There are qualified officers at the subordinate levels for doing that task. It is also not clear if officers belonging to Punjab will be given preference for the appointment as is the norm for other appointments like director Sainik Welfare which cannot be held by non-state individuals.

Among those who have been called for the interview on May 13 are Brig (Dr) Vikram Singh, Brig Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Maj Gen Balwinder Singh, Air Commodore Nitin Sathe, Maj Gen Pritpal Singh Bhatia, Air Commodore Deshpal Singh, Maj Gen S Radhakrishnan, Maj Gen JS Sandhu, Brig Sukrit Chadha, Maj Gen Devesh Gaur, Air Commodore IPS Bhatia, Brig Advitya Madan, Maj Gen Ajay H Chauhan, Brig Jangbahadur Singh, Brig S Vijay Bhaskar, Commodore Jatinder Singh and Brig Sandeep Rawat.

Among those in the interview panel will be senior bureaucrats of the Punjab government including Chief Secretary, Secretary Department of Employment Generation etc, Director Sainik Welfare and the former Director of the institute too.