Five years of one rank one pension

Five years ago, the Indian government took the historic decision to implement One Rank One Pension, (OROP) by issuing an order on 7 November 2015, benefit effective from 1 July 2014, despite huge financial burden, to the welfare of former servicemen. Armed forces personnel retired up to 30 June 2014 were covered under this order. Keeping in view the magnitude and complexity of defence pension, extensive consultations were held with experts and ex-servicemen before issue of government order on implementation of OROP. Former servicemen had been agitating for implementation of OROP nearly for the 45 years, but the same was not implemented before 2015.

OROP implies that uniform pension be paid to the armed forces personnel retiring in the same rank with the same length of service regardless of their date of retirement. Thus, OROP implies bridging the gap between the rate of pension of current and past retirees at periodic intervals. A sum of Rs 10,795.4 crore has been disbursed to 20,60,220 defence forces’ pensioners/family pensioners as arrears on account of implementation of OROP. The yearly recurring expenditure on account of OROP is about Rs 7,123.38 crore and for about six years starting from 1 July 2014, the total recurring expenditure worked out to approximately Rs 42,740.28 crore. OROP beneficiaries also got the benefit of fixation of pension under 7th CPC while calculating the pension by multiplication factor of 2.57. Following are the state-wise figures of amount released on account of OROP arrears as on 11 October 2019:

Above mentioned nation-wide payment details did not include the details of Nepali pensioners.