Praveen Teotia on Agniveer Scheme and Military Discipline

MARCOS commando and Surya Chakra awardee Praveen Teotia rarely gets asked to critique the institution he served.

In a recent conversation, he did, and the critique centred on two connected problems: how personal favours get disguised as military discipline, and why the Agniveer scheme may be undermining the very forces it was designed to strengthen.

The Unwritten Order

Praveen describes a category of instruction that never appears in any training manual: the personal errand passed off as duty.

Officers, he says, routinely ask soldiers to run groceries, book flights, receive guests, or deposit school fees, none of it documented, all of it carried out because refusing a senior is not something a soldier is trained to do.

He traces the habit back to the British era and argues it has continued largely unexamined since.

Once a soldier accepts that an order cannot be questioned, he says, there is no mechanism left to separate a legitimate instruction from an unethical one. Both arrive through the same door.

What has historically made this tolerable, in his account, is time.

 A career soldier serves roughly fifteen years, with a pension at the end, which gives him a reason to quietly absorb the unwritten rules until his exit.

Why Agniveer Breaks the Pattern

That calculation does not hold for a four-year Agniveer.

There is no long runway and no pension to soften the arrangement, and the starting salary, Rs 25,000 to 30,000 according to Praveen, leaves little room for anything beyond basic monthly expenses.

Supporting a family or funding further education during or after service becomes difficult on that income, which weakens the case for treating the uniform as a long-term career path.

The NDA Entry Gap

The most pointed part of Praveen's argument compares Agniveers to NCC cadets.

Cadets train for three years, largely in drill, basic navigation, first aid, and weapons familiarisation, and are rewarded with a direct interview opportunity into the National Defence Academy and Short Service Commission.

An Agniveer completes intensive combat training, including live weapons firing, in six months, a pace Praveen sets directly against the NCC's three-year timeline, yet has no equivalent route into NDA or SSC, even with a graduate degree in hand.

His argument is not that standards should be lowered.

It is that the forces have not built a genuine incentive for a capable four-year soldier to see a future inside the institution, whether that is a defined quota, a direct interview channel, or some other structural acknowledgement of the training already completed.

The Bigger Question

The conversation began with a question about how India can cultivate the kind of self-reliant discipline associated with the military and extend it to the wider population.

Praveen's answer reframes the premise: discipline cannot be enforced from outside, and it cannot be demanded of citizens while the institution most associated with it tolerates double standards inside its own ranks.

 Fixing the unwritten rules and the Agniveer entry gap, in his view, is the necessary first step, not an afterthought to the scheme's success.

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