General Rawat never claimed disability pension despite having a steel bar placed on his ankle due to a serious injury during an operation at the LoC in Kashmir.
Even when General Bipin Rawat took on the aggressive Chinese on the Doklam and Ladakh plateau, he will also be remembered for starting a war against corruption within the military establishment as he often used to say that the Indian armed forces were about respect. , not money.
As India’s first Chief of Defense Staff, he lobbied the Indian Army to ask the CBI to investigate the alleged corruption in the poor construction of the Married Housing (MAP) project in Meerut and the Enclave. of Salaria Officers in Delhi by the Military Engineering Services (MES). The total sanctioned cost of phases I and II of the MAP was ₹6,033 crore and ₹13,682 crore. He berated senior MES officials for shoddy construction and told them that the Salaria Enclave looked like bombed-out Syria, not New Delhi, with substandard material used for housing officers and jawans.
As head of the army, he initiated important reforms in the purchases of military canteens, much to the annoyance of the retired generals, putting a cap on ₹12 lakh on car purchase. When he discovered that high-ranking military officers were saving precious excise duties and buying luxury cars like Mercedes and SUVs and top-brand malt whiskeys via the canteen route, he removed these items from the canteen list saying that a normal officer or jawan cannot pay them out of existing salaries. Veterans hated him for putting a cap on and only allowing foreign liquor made in India to be sold in canteens, but General Rawat told them that if they had that much money, they should buy Mercedes or Blue Label whiskey on the free market and not dent . the indian treasure. For the Jawans, he made sure substandard produce didn’t make it to the military mess via the grease route.
Another area in which he fought against his own peer group was the misuse of the disability pension, especially by the top officials of the three services. Keeping his then Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman informed, General Rawat discovered that senior officers were deliberately lowering their pre-retirement medical status so as not to get disability benefits for themselves and their children, but also a tax-free pension. It found that, in many cases, a general, aviation marshal, or an admiral got a pension higher than their salary by using the disability pension route. While he was totally in favor of supporting the genuinely disabled who lost their limbs in war or insurgency, he was totally against the misuse of the disability pension. Perhaps it is for this very reason that Gen Rawat never claimed the disability pension despite having a steel rod placed inside his ankle due to a serious injury during an operation at the LoC in Kashmir.
Today, General Rawat goes down in history, but the reforms that he initiated within the military to make them more responsible cannot be stopped, since it is the need of the moment.
Close history
.