Indian panel concerned over suicides in armed forces

[dr.umer]

Indian panel concerned over suicides in armed forces ​

NEW DELHI: A parliamentary panel in India on Tuesday expressed grave concern over an alarming trend of suicides and fratricidal killings in the armed forces and called for reducing stress level causing psychological imbalance in soldiers.

The panel lamented the Defence Ministry’s insensitivity, asking it to make a realistic assessment of the problems plaguing the armed forces to identify areas for urgent reform.

There were 635 cases of suicides and attempted suicides and 67 cases of fratricidal killings in the three services in the past five years and yet the ministry downplayed the prevalence of this high rate. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence, headed by Congress MP Balasaheb Vikhe Patil, criticised the ministry for it.

Burden: “Besides adversely affecting efficiency and performance of the defence personnel due to impaired motivation, negative stress level also puts additional burden on the public exchequer in the form of employees’ sickness, cost of medical treatment and loss of trained officers and soldiers,” says the committee in its report on ‘Stress Management in the Armed Forces’ tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

The committee suggested that the duration of deployment of the defence service personnel in the counter-insurgency and high altitude operational areas should be rationalised to contain their stress levels.

Pointing out that the existing shortage of officers was also leading to greater stress among junior and middle level officers who had to perform multiple tasks, the committee said the Army Headquarters should be impressed upon ‘to keep the shortage of personnel at unit level to the barest minimum, particularly in the counter-insurgency and border areas so that the situation does not get worse’.

It has criticised the Defence Ministry for sharing with the committee only two of the nine studies undertaken by the armed forces and marking them as ‘secret’ despite having ‘nothing sensitive or strategic, which may adversely affect the interest of the nation’. The committee said it got the impression that no effective follow-up action had been taken after the studies in crucial areas such as sensitising officers and improving basic facilities in the field.

The committee called for making these studies public. “Veil of secrecy should be removed from such studies and the reports should be placed in public domain,” the committee said.

As regards certain measures initiated by the Defence Ministry in the recent past to manage stress in the armed forces, the report said “it is premature to ascertain the efficacy of these measures at this stage” since the committee felt the issue had not been perceived by the ministry to devise appropriate and timely strategy to minimize the stress level of the personnel.

Saying that ‘familial’ reasons were one of the predominating cause of stress among the armed forces, the committee recommended three specific remedial measures — providing family accommodation at the station of choice of the personnel deployed on operational duties in counter-insurgency and border areas; imparting skill development and helping children of the personnel in getting admission in schools and institutions of higher professional and technical studies; and giving more funds to welfare organisations of defence services personnel and their family members to enable them to extend necessary help to the distressed families of different ranks and act as psychological counsellors to soldiers and their family members..

Statutory provisions: It also called for statutory provisions mandating the district authorities to address the problems and grievances of the serving defence personnel and their families within a stipulated timeframe and a centralised mechanism to monitor progress on each complaint received from these personnel or their family members.