OROP 3 Pension Table - Govt Initiative & Expectation of Defence pensioners

OROP scheme has been successfully launched for impromvement of pension system of Indian Armed Forces. Govt has allotted huge amount to make payment the additional amount of pension in each revision of OROP during last 10 Years. In 2015, the Govt authority has issued notification to implement the OROP scheme effective from July 2014 to brought parity between the past and present pensioners with same rank and length of service.

After interacting the veteran organisations, it has been revealed that OROP provded to be not effective for the veterans belongs to JCOs/OR category as styated by them. The reasons as they listed, behind failure of OROP for JCOs/OR is as below-

(a) Process of Calculation of pension table prepared by the MoD is based on average of minimum and maximum pension drawn by veterans/family pensioners with given rank/length of service. Whereas the calculation of the OROP Pension table should be based on the maximum amount of pension drawing by a person with similar rank/service length.

(b) The amount of pension is too low for the PBOR, average pension is also not makes any notable difference for them. Rather , the improvement in pension should have based on the equal nature of time bound promotion applicable to Commissioned Officers of the Armed Forces.

(c) If 3 time bound promotion awarded to the Jawans/JCOs within first 13 years of service, pension will be improved for all retired personnel even after adopting the average pension policy, as existing process to create the OROP pension table.

(d) Frequency of OROP Revision should be Every year instead of 5 years. Due to a gap of 5 years, there exis huge difference between the pensioner who retired at the begining of year 1 and that of at the end of 5th year. So, frequency of revision should be yearly instead of 5 yearly.

(e) Report of anomaly committee ofn OROP has not been communicated to the veterans organisation/ Associations/ public domain. It shows lack of clarity and transparency in formulation of the scheme.

OROP 3 is likely to be due from July 2024, just 2 months left. No such activites has been initiated/communicated by the Defence accounts/pension disbursement authority till date. It takes time to decide the table and to get approval of the competent authority. It may be so that the SPARSH system may calculate the OROP table within few minutes and considering this fact, the Defence pension authority is confident enough to award the OROP pension revision on due date.