For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the One-Rank-One-Pension (OROP) has become a political hot potato that he can neither swallow nor drop. It was a promise made in the BJP's election manifesto, ahead of General Election 2014. Yet, two Budgets later, ex-servicemen are nowhere close to getting their dream of one-rank-one-pension realised.
A rejuvenated Rahul Gandhi, who has become the face of the Congress, the principal Opposition party, is taking a jibe at the PM, advising him to use the time spent to spread the message of Yoga to, instead, take a decision that is dear to the hearts of armed forces personnel.
The problem for Modi is not that he doesn't have the time to address the issue. The truth is that the problem has become so intractable that even jettisoning everything from Yoga to ‘Make in India' is no guarantee that a satisfactory solution can be found. But why has it become so intractable?
Unlike other organisations, which are not dogmatic about anything, including what they would declare as their 'core values', the armed forces find themselves unable to dilute even by an iota, the notion of a pyramid as the ideal form of organisational structure, which is an article of faith.
Management rubric
To be fair to them, the management theory itself has evolved around seeing most things through the rubric of pyramids — a geometric structure that epitomises all that is elegant by way of management solutions. You can't blame them. They are, after all, the original inventors of the 'pyramid' as an organisation structure that management thinkers later brazenly adopted as the de rigueur for organisations without worrying about such inane things as 'intellectual property rights'.
Just as the inverted pyramid is iconic for health workers engaged in spreading the message of planned parenthood, the upright pyramid is no less sacred for academicians and management thinkers. Their instinctive response to any management problem is to see the solution in terms of pyramids. Sounds incredible? Not really.
For Abraham Maslow, the problem of how to motivate an employee to give of his best in the cause of the organisation was easy to answer. Employees have various needs in a hierarchy of needs — from the most fundamental to the esoteric — stacked neatly along a pyramid with the goal of self-actualisation nestling at the pinnacle.
Take care of their various physical and intermediate needs and create an environment inside the organisation where an employee's efforts at fulfilling the ultimate need of self-actualisation meshes nicely with the interests of the organisation, and it becomes a win-win for both.
In other words, the hierarchy of needs of an employee is a pyramid with a large base of basic needs and other needs narrowing along the way to reach the pinnacle of self-actualisation. It is not only management scientists belonging to the 'behavioural school' but those viewing management in more structural terms who believe in it.
New complexities
Experts who believe that structures are the key to promoting efficiencies see a merit in the entity organising itself as a pyramid with a large number of workers at the bottom of the pyramid with a number of intermediate layers progressively narrowing as you rise up the hierarchy to the very top embodied in the office of the CEO.
Now, seasoned organisations in the world of commerce and business recognise the utility of pyramid style of organisational structure. At the same time they are not dogmatically wedded to it. They are confronted with the need to expand horizontally within a layer of the overall hierarchy of an organisation.
Sometimes it is just an expedient response to choosing between two individuals in the reckoning for a promotion to the next higher slot in the pyramid. At other times it is a response to the business environment.
The functional lines of a business have become more complex in recent times, resulting in expertise being distributed among more individuals than might have been the case in the past. Thus a purchase manager might at one time have managed the logistics and other supply chain functions of an organisation.
But a complex business environment and new regulatory requirements might have forced the organisation to split the function into two (procurement and logistics) with equal status and rank for both functionaries heading their respective operations.
Political expediency
A third possibility is that it is done to downgrade the relative importance of one vis-à-vis the other without having to show the incumbent the door. That is the nature of politics within an organisation.
The net result is that over time, the structure which starts out as a tightly structured pyramid soon begins to bulge here and there along the hierarchy. The large base is followed by some narrowing of width just immediately above it. This, then, gives way to some bulge in the layer just above and a narrowing in the layer further above it, and so on.
From the outside, the jagged outline resembles more a ‘Christmas Tree' rather than the neat vertical slope of a pyramid.
But the armed forces are not willing to forsake the tightly structured pyramid form, either for reasons of complexity or as a concession to realpolitik. If that means people have to be culled or, to use a more genteel expression, compulsorily retired at a very early age, then so be it. Or so the argument goes.
Army retirements
Such retirements (well ahead of their normal age of superannuation) result in keeping the armed forces ‘young' thus better equipped to battle the enemy than a rag tag force who would better fit a geriatric ward in a hospital than the battle field.
Soldiers, if they have not been promoted to the rank of Non-Commissioned Officers within, say, 15 years, must give way to younger men starting at the bottom. The process is repeated all the way up in the more senior ranks. The NCO, in turn, must retire by the time he reaches 45 years if he cannot be promoted as lieutenant, a Major by the age of 50 and a Lieutenant General at age 60, if he doesn't make it to the rank of Chief of Army Staff.
Demographics are such an unforgiving phenomenon. If people start retiring early, then, over time, the cohort of retired armed force personnel mirror the same pyramid of those currently in service. You might say that it is just plain bad luck. Except that you will find two retired Majors of practically the same age but drawing vastly different pensions. Why? Because one had joined earlier and served out his quota of service in that rank and so had to retire (compulsions of pyramid structure) while the other joined later.
The good fortune for the latter is that a Pay Commission intervened in between and the Government had raised the salary for Majors and, hence, the pension as well. The result is that the senior, who may have retired earlier, ends up drawing a pension that is just half of what the young, freshly retired major would be drawing.
Alternative picture
Imagine an alternative scenario. Ignore the rigidity of pyramid structures and allow people to serve out their full time till they reach the age of superannuation, the problem becomes a lot simpler. If the Army still insists on a tight 'pyramid' structure, the only option is to have a wider base of soldiers. But that puts neighbouring countries in a spot. Why is India expanding its army? Does it have hegemonistic intentions over its neighbours? The political authority of the day cannot have neighbouring countries fretting over this. Imagine the Modi Government having to handle the concerns of Bangladesh and Myanmar on the question, leave alone Pakistan.
The bottomline: The base of the pyramid cannot be easily expanded. But the purity of the structure has also to be preserved. Disaffection among the ranks, which a rigid adherence to the structure may engender, must also be avoided. An impossible conundrum, isn't it?
The moral of the story is this. Pyramid structures are all very well. But too much of a good thing that can be harmful. It is so for individuals. And it is just as true for organisations.