After rebuffing that any changes is going to make in SSB (Service Selection Board) procedures for picking most suitable defence officers out of the bunch of interviewees, Indian Military Academy (IMA) Commandant lt Gen Manvender Singh said that the time duration between applying and joining the academy may be curtailed in the near future.
According to him, the Government may decrease the duration from nearly one year to six months in the coming days. Interacting with the mediapersons in a press conference held at IMA, lt Gen Singh stressed that SSB’s procedures are scientifically designed and tested after years of research and each of the candidates is being adjudged separately by three mentors during his stay in SSB for a span of nearly five-days.
He also expressed his satisfaction over the selection of candidates, who undergo training at academy and ranked them with having high OlQs (Officer like Qualities).
“The main purpose of the training is to further brushing-up OlQs of Gentlemen Cadets (GCs) during their pre-commissioned training at Academy,” he stressed, adding that special focus has been laid by instructors to enhance moral values, ethics, character and physical building.
lt Gen Singh said the academy has recently introduced forward areas tours for GCs in order to get them acquainted with the ground realities and finally help them to perform better along international borders and disturbed areas. After realising that information technology plays a pivotal role in the current warfare, he said that plans are in the pipelines to distribute tabs or notebooks to GCs but restricted external links.
He said that the notebooks would be equipped with military history, military warfare, journals and movies on military etc. besides, five computers each in 16 companies were already installed having external links. lt Gen Singh stressed that more number of Foreign Gentlemen Cadets (FGCs) from friendly foreign countries from different continents are coming for military training due to the high training of standards of IMA.
After expressing his concern over the land constraint issue, lt Gen Singh told that the academy administration regularly apprises district administration over encroachment issues around the academy premises and most of the issues were resolved. Additionally, two flyovers with an estimated cost of Rs 91 crore would be constructed in the near future in order to ensure disrupted free traffic movement. He said that CCTVs and bio-metric system were already introduced in the Academy in order to avoid any breach of the security.