With a view to realigning the leadership with the prevailing challenges as well as those that may come up in the future, the Indian Army is gearing to implement a new and comprehensive promotion policy with effect from 1 January, 2024. The policy will be applied for “select ranks” of colonel, brigadier, major general and lieutenant general.
With this new policy, the prospects for officers for promotion will be expanded. It will particularly benefit those in the rank of Major General. Officers who have received approval for promotion in the ‘staff’ division will be eligible for further promotion within the ‘staff’ division itself. As a result, more officers across all branches and services will be able to achieve their career goals.
Before this move, the selection boards differed in their processes and policies, which caused inconsistency even in the human resource management practices. The new policy will standardise the criteria and procedures across all selection boards and ensure consistency.
Now, not only will the opportunities for promotion increase, but equal promotion opportunities will be available across branches and services, and meritocracy will be further upheld and strengthened. This is being seen as a solution for senior leaders to fulfil their aspirations.
It is hoped that this move will clearly state the operational requirements of the Indian Army and ensure equality when it comes to the selection and ranking process.
3 Comments
Every day changes of policies is harming competent officers. All promotions finally boil down to who is the IO, RO and SRO and their grading system whether lax or strict. So called criteria course, finally has nothing to do with your promotion as a soldier or warrior. Man who proves his mettle on ground is ignored even if he is PVC, MVC, Vr C or any other gallantry award holder. A good soldier is a happy mix of ground soldiering and professionally sound. How can we explain the promotion of professionally inactive person for decades getting further promotion? The policy we make must be foolproof so that competent persons are not disillusioned with the system and perform in the time of need. ACR should have 360 degree evaluation process. Rote learning must be downgraded to back seat.
Promotion policy has always been modified to fit someone special into it. Country has seen policy change during Gen VK Singh’s case of Date of Birth. How it was manipulated military people know it better. How can a man’s DOB change ? Ground soldiers will never be promoted to higher ranks and only paper tigers with connections with higher ups will rule the roost till ACR criteria is made 360 degree evaluation. Today officers mostly confine themselves into books only and spend very little time with soldiers. Earlier CO of the unit use to know every jawan by name including his family problems, that actually earned them respect. Today officers concentrate their efforts only towards promotion and not soldiering. Soldiering is an art, it has to be learnt if you want to be a good leader.
Compartmentalisation into arms and services has done a lot of damage to the selection process where maximum promotions go to infantry and services get the least. The new comparmentalisation into general cadre and now command and staff positions too has done further damage. By merging all forces into theatre commands needs to do away all these compartments and all officers must be given equal opportunities.