NEW DELHI: Weeks before the first batch of Agniveers was due to start exiting the armed forces, the government on Wednesday rewrote a key provision of the Agnipath scheme. The 75% not retained after their four-year stint will now get two more years in uniform and another shot at being a regular soldier.
The Cabinet's nod for a "second engagement period" effectively creates a six-year pathway to regular military service for those willing to stay on and able to meet the selection criteria. The original provision for 25% of each batch to be absorbed on merit at the four-year mark remains untouched.
Announcing the decision, CDS Gen NS Raja Subramani in the capital said the armed forces had recommended the change after sustained assessments of the Agniveers' performance. The services had deliberated on it for three to four months before the Cabinet gave the green light. Defence minister Rajnath Singh dubbed it a 'Second Tour of Duty'.
To sweeten the deal, the second tour comes with higher pay and a bigger Seva Nidhi package. Agniveers, however, remain outside the pension and gratuity net that covers regular soldiers.
Those enrolled as regulars after six years will rank in seniority below the 25% absorbed at the four-year mark, the CDS said. Under the original framework, Agniveers selected for regular service after four years have to serve a further minimum of 15 years.
The push came from the armed forces themselves. They had increasingly questioned the logic of showing the door to soldiers just when they had become operationally useful.
For the Navy and IAF, the four-year exit hurt most in technical trades, where it takes time to master complex systems on warships and aircraft. Letting such personnel go just as they became proficient meant losing hard-won expertise and starting from scratch with replacements. For the Army, it went beyond training costs to unit cohesion. By the end of four years, Agniveers had blended into their units and imbibed the camaraderie at the heart of the paltan ethos.
The government, however, is not junking the Agnipath model. Gen Subramani said the scheme was "not set in stone" and would be reviewed periodically, pointing that more tweaks could follow.
The new pathway also has a knock-on effect on the resettlement framework built for exiting Agniveers. The CDS indicated that the resettlement schemes rolled out by the home ministry for ex-Agniveers would now be scrapped. Several states, including UP, Haryana and Maharashtra, had separately announced reservations for them in police and other government jobs.
The decision also has financial implications. When Agnipath was first introduced, its stated aim was to bring down the average age of soldiers, which then stood at around 32 years. While the government never officially spelt it out, the scheme was also widely seen as a way to curb the armed forces' growing pension liabilities by limiting the number of recruits entering the regular cadre.
For 2026-27, the defence pension bill has been budgeted at Rs 1.71 lakh crore, covering over 34 lakh pensioners. Under the new pathway, a significantly larger share of Agniveers could eventually move into the pensionable cadre, potentially diluting one of the key cost-saving objectives behind the scheme.