One recruit, one salary

Agnipath pits batchmates against one another, creating incentives for each other's failure rather than success

The government, deaf to protests, is going ahead with implementing the so-called Agnipath Yojana recruitment scheme that it announced without warning on June 14. Without much explanation of its benefits and drawbacks, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has presented it as a “transformative measure” that will change the recruitment pattern of Agniveers (hereafter, soldiers, sailors and airmen who join under the Agnipath Yojana) from the current long-service — 15-year bond that culminates in a lifelong pension— to a mainly short-service contract under which annual tranches of recruits will serve for four years. After that, 75 per cent of them go