More delays in OROP will be hard to justify
In his Mann ki Baat address on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured that the one-rank-one-pension scheme for retired defence personnel would most certainly be implemented soon. He said that the issue had turned out to be more complicated than he had imagined. Earlier, Minister for Defence Manohar Parrikar had said that his ministry had done its paperwork and forwarded the file to the Union Ministry of Finance. Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha had noted that his ministry was studying the methodology for arriving at the pension amount and that it would soon finalise the issue. Taken together, these statements reveal two things.
The first is that the Government is determined to make good its promise sooner than later. The finalisation of the scheme could be announced before the Prime Minister's customary Independence Day speech of August 15. The OROP was among the most prominent promises Mr Modi had made during the campaign for the 2014 lok Sabha election; and he is facing flak from both the opposition parties and former service personnel over the delay of one year in realising it. The retired defence forces personnel are already impatient, and the ‘boycott' by a war veteran of a function Mr Parrikar attended recently is an indication of that. The Government, for political reasons, if not nothing else, will certainly not want the issue to linger longer than is absolutely necessary.
Mr Modi knows this, which is why he has attempted to stem the criticism by observing that, while parties can continue to play politics, his Government is firm in keeping its promise. The second thing is that unexpected complications have indeed cropped up in what had initially appeared to be a straight calculation of the pension amount. It had seemed simple enough to arrive at a figure given that the basic premise — same pension for personnel who had retired in the same rank with the same duration of service, regardless of their time of retirement — was clear enough. Apparently, other factors, some possibly extraneous, have come into play, leading to a difference in opinion in the methodology of calculation. This has had the effect of generating loads of speculation on the issue, and it would be in the Modi dispensation's interest to quickly close the matter in a satisfactory manner.
Meanwhile, the Congress has gleefully latched on to the issue, blaming the Prime Minister and his Government for ‘misleading' former service personnel with tall promises that he has not kept. The Congress forgets its own role in the mess. In the 10 years that it was in power, it had failed to find a solution. The delay had not just deprived our retired jawans the dues they deserved but also contributed to the ensuing complications. Had the matter been settled early, the fresh obstacles which emerged later could have been avoided. Nonetheless, any further delay will be hard for the Modi Government to justify.