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India's army
Unfit for service
From The Economist print edition
A shortage of officer material is another sign of India's talent deficit
A FULL-PAGE advertisement ran in many English-language newspapers in India on January 15th for the “Harbingers of Peace and Stability”—the country's 1.1m soldiers. The occasion, Army Day, is an annual celebration of the world's second-biggest regular force. Yet the army now has a particular need of publicity: in a country of over 1 billion people, it needs more officers. Harbingers of the right stuff are proving hard to find.
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...but not enough chiefs |
The army is short of 11,000 officers, almost a quarter of the total muster. Worse threatens. The shortage is most acute in the lower ranks, and the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun, a school for officer cadets, can currently fill only 86 of its 250 places. The army is also losing some of the officers that it now has: over 3,000 have applied for early retirement in the past three years. This week the army chief, General Deepak Kapoor, suggested that the government might one day have to introduce conscription.
The general blamed the shortage of officer material, from which the navy and air force are suffering to lesser degrees, on India's zinging economy. Graduate hirelings of the country's trendiest computer-services companies can sometimes earn twice a junior officer's monthly salary of 20,000 rupees ($500). Moreover, the army has for decades been tangled up in nasty insurgencies in Kashmir and north-eastern India. And it has been hurt by a series of scandals, some involving corrupt top brass, others suicidal soldiers.
To improve matters, the army is banking on a generous pay rise this year; it wants junior officers' salaries to be doubled. This would at least improve its bid for India's small pool of well-educated graduates. But, given soaring wage inflation in private firms, which are also struggling to hire the talent they need, it would not fix the problem.
That will require a bigger talent pool. After all, there is no shortage of young Indians who want an army career—or indeed, given persistent high unemployment, any sort of career. The problem is that only a privileged minority of school- and college-leavers can pass the army's entrance exams for officer training. In order to match India's rise to global importance, the army needs many things: more money, better technology and a coherent foreign policy on which to build its doctrine. Above all, however, like all India, it needs more decent schools.
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