Is there corruption in the Indian Army, and to what extent?

Indian Army has its share of corruption going on. But I’ll not talk about the big scams like low quality uniform & boots contracts & supply rather focus on small corruptions. One of my relative is a Havaldar in the Indian Army. I’ll be extremely honest here. He isn’t very well educated (not even a graduate) & joined the army just so that he could earn enough money to feed himself & his mother properly. His father had died in his childhood & he has faced a lot of dificulties growing up. They couldn’t even afford their meals. So, he hadn’t initially joined Army due to the love for the nation but once he had joined, he carried out his duties with utmost dedication. He had been serving in the Army for more than 15 years and has served for 8–10 of those years in Kashmir region where the temperature goes as low as -20 degree Celsius. During the remaining years, he was stationed at Dehradun & a some small place in central India. He has taken pre-mature voluntary retirement a few months ago due to his growing health issues and the fact that he has developed problems in his legs due to years in the freezing weather.

He is a very simple and truthful man with a pure heart thus I believe him and so do I believe the complaints by thousands & thousands of armymen (both serving & retired) on various pages on facebook made for the sole purpose of highlighting these problems faced by them. So, some of the problems faced by him & other sepoys are -

The officers use the lower rank army personals as their personal servants. You would find sepoys doing their household works like gardening & bringing groceries. These sepoys are not appointed for their personal work but still you’ll find a good no. of these sepoys working as these officer’s personal servants. Only sepoy appointed for them are their drivers, that too for work timings only.

Once he & another colleague were appointed the chore/job of taking an officer’s dog in a train from Dehradun to Chennai in a 1AC compartment. The tickets were of course paid by the government and the officially stated purpose of the journey was shifting something important!!!! If that’s not corruption then what is?

The transfer/posting department has its own share of corruption. A lot of sepoys are reposted in hard areas like Kashmir again & again. So, their are ways to get a posting to a safer area just like there are ways to escape when caught without helmet by the traffic police.

Bribery for Promotion.

Corruption in the mess budget. This happens in bigger army/airforce stations and not prominent everywhere so exceptions must be there. There are different mess for the different ranks. And as the ranks come down, so does the quality of food served too. Though the food budget is considering all army personals as equals, still there is unaccounted money deductions which is balanced by bringing down the food quality of the mess for the lower ranks.

The sepoys are treated like shit by the higher officials at many instances but as its not corruption, let’s leave it.

My friends father also has been serving in the Indian Air Force proudly for the past 20+ years and according to my observations, these problems are also present in Air Force but on a smaller scale.

I personally confirmed the mess problem as exactly told when I had to visit my friends father once. I ate the food from 2 different mess, one meant for the ranks of my father & another from the mess meant for ranks lower than his. (They aren’t allowed in the mess for higher ranked personals than them, so couldn’t eat the food from the highest mess.. :D )

There are a lot more similar small things but you might have got an idea by now.

And I would like to state that, I don’t believe that everyone in the Indian Army or Defense is like this and these might be the case of a few & also the fact that I might be partially wrong as I’m not myself an internal part of Indian Army/Air Force but I felt the compulsion to write this as I believe most of it is true & did not include the points I doubted.

I’m sorry if my answer hurts any honest & patriotic son of the nation especially those serving in the Indian Defense. I understand it can hurt the good ones who serve with utmost dedication & show empathy towards all the soldiers without any regard to their ranks or background.