IDR Blog
Can committee of secretaries do justice to the armed forces?
Often the political executive appears to find solutions to difficult problems with the help of a group of secretaries. In some cases, this group of secretaries may not have complete knowledge and grasp of the issues under examination. In the late eighties the Army evaluated a number of indigenously developed diesel engines for the Vijayanta...
Has the military been given a raw deal on the pay front?
6Th Central Pay Commission (CPC) had, besides a few bureaucrats as part of the commission, approximately 125 officers drawn from various central services, (but none from the defence services) such as, postal service, Indian forest Service, police etc, on its staff to work out the nitty-gritty of the report. Predictably, these...
Is Pakistan Taliban on the come-back trail?
On June 24, 2012, about 100 followers of Maulana Fazlullah, a Pakistani Taliban leader who used to operate from the Swat Valley of the Khyber-Pakhtunkwa Province of Pakistan and who have since taken sanctuary in the Nuristan area of Afghanistan after they were driven out of Swat by the Pakistani Army in 2009, infiltrated into the Dir Area of...
Is corruption wide spread in the military?
A TV channel recently showed a sting operation where a junior commissioned officer is caught on camera handling wads of currency notes obtained from prospective candidates for various jobs in the military’ with a colonel rank officer allegedly operating in the background. A maj-gen is caught red handed taking money from a contractor. These...
Are the anti-Maoist operations fake?
It is difficult to totally avoid collateral deaths of innocent civilians in counter-insurgency operations, but it is important to take every precaution possible to reduce such deaths. …counter-insurgency operations themselves, instead of putting down the insurgency, become a root cause of more insurgency. When the security forces do not...