Annually, 120 Defence personnel have been committing suicide and 270 officers quitting the force for the last five years. The Army has reported the highest number of suicides and it is having around 18 per cent shortage of officers.
Defence Minister Arun Jaitley informed the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday that 597 armed forces personnel committed suicide in the last five years.
The number of these incidents came down due to several remedial steps and 86 cases were reported last year, he said. During the period 2009-2013, 498 Army personnel took the extreme step while 83 such incidents took place in the IAF and 16 in the Navy.
The highest number of suicides took place in the Army in 2010 when 116 personnel committed suicide. Elaborating upon the measures taken to bring down suicides, Jaitley said these included improvement in living conditions of jawans, liberal leave policy, grievance redressal mechanism and yoga and counseling sessions to reduce stress.
As regards officers quitting the armed forces, he said the Army, the largest of the three Services, saw 1,349 officers taking premature retirement in the last five years.
The number of officers who had applied for premature retirement was 2,215 but only 1,349 such requests were granted by the force.
Answering a query on shortage of officers in the Army, Jaitley said the force was short of 8,455 officers, which was 17.7 per cent below the authorised strength.
He said several measures to address the issue like increasing the tenure of short service commission officers from 10 to 14 years and vigorous campaigns to attract more youths into joining the force were initiated.
There was gradual improvement in the last five years with shortage of officers reducing from 26 per cent in 2010 to 17.7 in 2014, the minister said.