Tortuous tale of LCA
By Pritam Bhullar

THE Ministry of Defence (MOD) in its seventh report of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence tabled in the Lok Sabha on April 21, stated that the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) has been hit by the US sanctions and would be testflown in July this year. How have the post-Pokhran-II US sanctions come in the way of the LCA which was to be inducted into service by 1995.

It was in 1978 that a scientist , Dr Kota Hari Narayana, had promised to start the production of the LCA in two years. The MOD now states that the final operational clearance for LCA would be given in 2005.

Why do we call it an indigenous project when its engine is supplied by the USA, the avionics by France and the radar by Sweden? We have been hearing for the last 10 years that the American II (GE-404) engine would be replaced by the Kaveri engine which is being developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) we have also been hearing about the other components.

It was wrong for India to think that it could develop an ambitious project like the LCA single-handedly. Even the leading industrial countries like Britain, Germany, Italy and Sweden are not trying to built high-performance combat aircraft because of the development costs of these aircraft being beyond their individual capabilities. These countries generally go in for pooling of resources as we have seen in case of the Jaguar, the Alfa Jet Trainer (AJT) and now the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA).

The LCA project is one of the several such projects on which we have been pussyfooting for the past many decades. Would we ever learn from our mistakes?

Justice in uniform

In April, the Punjab and Haryana High Court reduced the sentence of an Army Jawan, who was convicted by a general court martial ( GCM) from three years to one-and-a half years for the reason that he was tried under a wrong section. This is one of the many examples where the High Court has found a lacuna in the military system of delivering justice. Perceptibly, three reasons can be ascribed to such anomalies.

One, today even a Jawan knows what his rights are and when he feels that justice has not been done to him, he rushes to a civil court to seek justice. Two, military officers, barring the officers the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG’s) Branch, are not legally qualified and have only a working knowledge of the Military law. Three, discipline takes precedence over justice and fair play in the armed forces.

This is because discipline is the life breath of an army. The peculiar exigencies of military service often place unlimited demands on the members of the armed forces, which can be met only by enforcing strict discipline.

Be that as it may, a check needs to be kept on the "draconian handling" of disciplinary cases where some overzealous officers push justice to the backseat in their attempt to stamp out indiscipline from their units or formations.

The Law Commission’s recommendation that an appellate tribunal, headed by a retired civilian judge with two members from the armed forces— a retired JAG and a serving JAG of the rank of a Maj-Gen or equivalent from the other two services, as applicable, should be appointed to review court martial cases. This recommendation being sound, should be accepted.

Cardiac care

A question often asked is why can’t the command hospitals be provided with the latest equipment that is available in most civil hospitals. The answer is simple : it is the resource crunch that makes the defence forces work on a shoestring budget. This disadvantage notwithstanding, concerted efforts are always made to improve upon the diagnostic and treatment facilities in military hospitals.

Take for example, the Command Hospital Chandimandir where neither a cardiologist nor the tread mill test (TMT) machine was available in 1994. Over the years, the hospital has continued to inch forward in providing better facilities to the patients. After a cardiologist was posted to the hospital a few years ago, came one of the best computerised TMT (Mortara) machine. Soon after that was added the facility of plain eco-cardiography. Equipments like 2D-eco (colour doppler), Holter monitoring and catscan are likely to come shortly.

Not only that, a cardiac care van fully equipped with all the resuscitative and monitoring facilities is always ready and can be made available on call to carry heart patients.

As for the TMT, it is one of the most widely used methods in the diagnosis of ischaemic heart disease (IHD). The basic principle of this stress test is to progressively impose increasing stress on the cardiovascular system by graded exercise (brisk walking on inclined plane ) and observe changes in the heart rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram (ECG), which are constantly monitored during the exercise.

Revision of pension

The Problem that is agitating a sizeable number of ex-servicemen, widows of ex-soldiers is that their pension/ family pension has not been revised because their application forms, indicating the revised pension as per the recommendations of the Fifth Pay Commission , have not come back from the CDA (Pensions) or the record offices concerned so far.

This problem is more pronounced in case of personnel below officer rank (PBOR). To quote only three of the several such examples, an ex-serviceman L.S. Gill (rank not mentioned ) writes from village Bela, Ropar district that the forms of a large number of them sent in November and December 1998 have not come back from the record offices.

In case of Hav Bhagat Ram and Flt Sgt Om Prakash Mahajan, both from Panchkula, these forms have come back from the Record Offices concerned with the remarks that Part II of the form has not been completed by the Pension Disbursing Authority (PDA) nor has the office stamp been put on them. A large number of forms have come back with these remarks.

The Defence Pension Disbursing Officers (DPDOs) should scrutinise the forms before despatching them to the Record Offices. The record offices would do well to send a bimonthly progress report to the Army Headquarters specifying the date upto which the forms received by them have been disposed off. A periodic press release on the disposal of these cases by the Army Headquarters would go a long way in bringing satisfaction to the ex-serviceman.