One Rank One Pension: Modi’s Decision on a Long-Pending Veterans’ Demand

A demand that outlasted more than a dozen changes of government finally became policy in November 2015. This article covers what One Rank One Pension actually means, why it took over four decades to implement, and what disputes have continued since.

What OROP Means

One Rank One Pension ensures that armed forces personnel who retire in the same rank, after completing the same length of service, receive the same pension amount, regardless of when they actually retired, according to the government’s own explanation of the scheme. Before OROP, India’s military pension system was calculated on a slab basis that could leave an officer who retired years earlier receiving significantly less than someone who retired more recently in the exact same rank and with the same years of service, purely because of when their retirement happened to fall.

A Demand Stretching Back Decades

Veterans had pushed for this specific reform for more than 40 years, with the underlying grievance tracing back to 1973, when the government of the time discontinued full pension parity across retirement dates, replacing it with the slab-based system that veterans considered unfair, since it systematically disadvantaged those who had retired earlier regardless of matching rank and service length.

The 2015 Implementation

BJP included a commitment to implement OROP in its 2014 election manifesto, and Modi’s government formally notified the scheme on November 7, 2015, with financial benefits made effective retroactively from July 1, 2014. Initial arrears under the scheme totalled roughly Rs 10,795 crore, distributed to approximately 2.06 million beneficiaries, according to government figures on the scheme’s rollout.

The Ongoing Cost

OROP has proven to be a substantial and continuing financial commitment rather than a one-time payment. Cumulative expenditure under the scheme reached approximately Rs 1,24,974 crore by 2024, with annual recurring costs running between roughly Rs 7,000 and 12,000 crore, and defence pensions overall now accounting for close to 24 percent of India’s total defence budget allocation, a scale that reflects both the genuine size of India’s veteran population and the government’s sustained financial commitment to the scheme since its 2015 launch.

Why Some Veterans Remained Unsatisfied

Despite the scheme’s implementation, dissatisfaction among sections of the veteran community has continued in the years since, centred on several specific, more technical disputes: anomalies in how pensions were calculated for certain ranks, including some technical and captain-level positions, disagreements over the pace and detail of resolving these calculation discrepancies, with the Supreme Court at one point criticising delays in the government’s response, and continued veteran advocacy for annual pension revision rather than the five-year revision cycle the scheme actually established, which some veteran groups argue doesn’t keep pace closely enough with the original “same pension, same rank, same service” principle the scheme was meant to guarantee.

A Genuine Achievement With Real, Ongoing Friction

It’s worth holding both facts together for an accurate picture: OROP represented a genuine, long-overdue policy achievement, delivering on a veterans’ demand that multiple previous governments across different parties had failed to implement over more than four decades, while also generating its own specific implementation disputes that have kept parts of the veteran community engaged in ongoing advocacy and, at points, litigation, even after the core policy was delivered.

Veteran Protests That Continued After Implementation

Even after the scheme’s November 2015 notification, some veteran groups staged public protests over what they considered an incomplete or diluted version of the original demand, with reports at the time describing continued dissatisfaction over the specific formula used for pension parity calculations, which some veterans argued did not fully match the “same pension for same rank and service” principle the scheme was meant to deliver in its purest form, illustrating that even a genuinely delivered long-standing demand can still generate real disagreement over its precise implementation details.

The 2022 Supreme Court Ruling

The scheme’s calculation methodology faced a further legal test in 2022, when the Supreme Court considered a challenge from a group of ex-servicemen over specific pension revision disputes. According to Hindustan Times’s coverage of the ruling, the court ultimately upheld the government’s position on the specific matter before it, a result that left some petitioning ex-officers unhappy even as it confirmed the government’s calculation approach had cleared judicial scrutiny on that particular question.

Bottom Line

One Rank One Pension addressed a genuine, more than four-decade-old grievance among India’s military veterans when Modi’s government formally implemented it in November 2015, a substantial and continuing financial commitment that has grown to nearly a quarter of the total defence budget, even as specific calculation disputes and calls for more frequent revision have kept the scheme’s finer details a subject of continued veteran advocacy since.

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Abhyudaya Verma