Resettlement courses for jawans to resume

But CAG says no steps in place to ensure that trained personnel can find re-employment

July 29, 2016 01:22 am | Updated 01:22 am IST - NEW DELHI:

Ending the uncertainty surrounding retirement plans of thousands of soldiers, the Defence Ministryon Tuesday clarified that it would soon resume resettlement training courses for jawans that were put on hold to align it with the new norms of the Ministry of Skill Development.

“The resettlement training courses were put on hold to align the courses to the new norms of the government on skill development,” Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.

MoU signed

Elaborating on the issue, Mr. Parrikar stated that the Defence Ministry has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in July 2015, following which all skill courses of DGR are to be aligned to National Occupational Standards (NOS) by December, 2016 and the temporary suspension was on that account.

In addition, Mr. Parrikar noted that certain complaints were received regarding conducting training by the Director General Resettlement (DGR) for different courses through training institutes.

“However, these allegations have not been established,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in a report tabled on Tuesday had pulled up the DGR for failing to meet objectives in re-employing or rehabilitating the 60,000 jawans retiring every year and the courses are out of sync with changing times, it noted.

“After incurring an expenditure of Rs. 90.98 crore on training in last five years, there was no mechanism in place to ensure that the trained personnel could eventually find re-employment,” it stated.

Nearly 60,000 armed forces personnel retire or are released from active service every year, most of them being in the comparatively younger age bracket of 35-45 years and 50-55 years on the higher side.

The courses are conducted for soon-to-be retiring personnel as well for Ex-Service Men (ESM). CAG pointed out discrepancies in both.

CAG’s observation

CAG noted that the guidelines that were issued by DGR did not lay down the qualifying requirements to be looked into by service headquarters for accepting the requests received from officers and personnel below officer ranks.

“Service HQs therefore selected trainees without any criteria and allocated courses to them arbitrarily,” it observed.

In respect of ESM, there was no record with DGR on the number of applications received, numbers of Ex-Service Men deployed for training and actually undertaking training.

“In the absence of any documentation there was no trail to assess the implementation of the scheme,” the report said.

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