Training IAS and Judicial Officers: From trenches and jails to courtrooms.....by KBS Sidhu

Why First-Hand Exposure Makes for Better Governance — and Why India Still Owes Its Ex-Servicemen a Better Deal

The Provocation: Why Magistrates Should See What Custody Means

A recent tweet of mine, prompted by a Times of India report on the Supreme Court’s observation that jail without trial amounts to punishment, drew a response far beyond anything I had anticipated. I had suggested that just as IAS probationers, during their foundation training, are required to spend a couple of nights in Army trenches as part of their attachment with the Army, Judicial Magistrates too should be required to spend at least one night in an ordinary police station and one night in an ordinary jail.

When they remand individuals to such custody, I argued, they ought to possess some direct understanding of the conditions they are imposing. Such exposure, I suggested, may foster greater sensitivity, realism, and empathy in judicial decision-making.

The response was overwhelming by my standards. In little over twenty-four hours, the post drew more than eleven thousand interactions. Most readers agreed. Some, inevitably, used the occasion to make uncharitable remarks about the civil services in general and about the IAS and IPS in particular. But beneath the noise lay a serious question: does such exposure really help, or is it merely symbolic?

I believe it helps. I believe so not as a matter of abstract theory, but from the experience of a lifetime in public service. My conviction comes not from fashionable talk of “experiential learning”, but from memory, field experience, administrative responsibility, and repeated introspection over the years. If I was able, at different stages of my career, to show unusual concern for ex-servicemen and their families, it was not accidental. It arose, in no small measure, from a formative experience in my probationary years: my Army attachment — an experience that left a particularly deep impression on me because I did not come from a traditionally “military” background, notwithstanding the fact that my grandfather, Dr Gurdial Singh, FRCS, had seen action as a Captain in Italy during the Second World War.

Mussoorie, 1984: A Generation Formed in Turbulent Times

Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That line captures, with some accuracy, the atmosphere in which our batch entered the Academy at Mussoorie in the 1984. The egregious Operation Blue Star had already taken place.

Then came the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984, followed by the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi and elsewhere. Those were deeply troubled and painful times for the country, and particularly unsettling for Sikh officers and probationers. I still remember, vividly, how we escaped a hostile mob on that fateful morning in the heart of Kanpur town. Such experiences leave behind not only memory, but also a sharper awareness of how fragile institutions and civil order can become.

After the initial phase of training, we proceeded for our Army attachment. I was assigned to the group going to Jammu and Kashmir. Via Pathankot, we reached Jammu Tawi, which for me was also the first sight again of Punjab after I had left for Mussoorie. Without fuss and with characteristic military efficiency, we were placed on a long road journey, nearly twelve hours, up to Srinagar. After a brief night at the transit camp, we were split into smaller groups and escorted to our respective formations.

The Army Attachment: Lessons No Classroom Could Teach

The IAS lady probationers were given the option of staying at Ramgarh, the brigade headquarters, which most declined. The drive along the Jhelum remains etched in memory for its stark beauty.

We halted for lunch there, and then four of us were attached to a Gorkha Regiment unit commanded by Colonel Dipinder Singh at Uri, long before Uri acquired the tragic prominence it carries today in public consciousness.

One image from that visit has never left me: a milestone bearing, in Urdu, the words “Haji Pir Pass – 0”. To young probationers, it was a reminder not merely of geography, but of military sacrifice, strategic gain, and political compromise — of ground taken at heavy cost and then yielded at Tashkent.

The attachment lasted a week. It was not merely a symbolic exercise in trekking, crawling, and returning with a certificate. There were lectures, tactical briefings, discussions on strategy, and attempts to help young civil servants understand the operational mind of the Army. But what stayed with me most was not the classroom content.

It was the nights in trenches, the exposure to field conditions, the cold discipline of military life, and the direct encounter, however brief, with soldiers whose daily routine involved alertness, endurance, hardship, and the possibility of mortal risk.

When the attachment ended, we returned to the rigours of the Phase I training course at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. Yet something had altered. I did not become a soldier, nor was that the purpose. But the experience left behind a frame of reference. It made me less likely ever again to think of soldiers merely in ceremonial terms — at parades, wreath-laying functions, or Republic Day tableaux. I had, in a small way, glimpsed the world from which the ex-serviceman emerges. That mattered.

Why Exposure Changes the Exercise of Power

The reason I connect that memory to the judiciary is simple. Institutions often exercise power in abstraction. A remand order may be passed in a few moments, recorded in a few lines, and treated as routine. But for the person sent into a police lock-up or an ordinary jail, there is nothing routine about it. The law may permit such custody; procedure may normalise it; caseload may encourage mechanical handling. Yet none of these should excuse ignorance of lived conditions.

A magistrate who has never spent even a few hours in an ordinary police station or district jail may know the law, but still remain insulated from the human consequences of its exercise. Exposure is not a substitute for legal principle. But it can humanise legal power. It can make indifference harder. It can temper routine with realism. It can introduce an element of conscience into discretion.

Would a night in a police station and a night in jail solve the profound problems of undertrial incarceration, judicial delay, police excess, or prison overcrowding? Certainly not. But it may do something subtler and more enduring: it may change temperament. And in public life, temperament matters.

Amritsar: Where Theory Became Administrative Practice

Many who reacted to my tweet asked whether such exposure really makes any lasting difference. I have asked myself the same question repeatedly over the years. My honest answer is yes. The strongest proof lies in my dealings with ex-servicemen during my field postings and later at senior policy levels.

This became clearest during my years in Amritsar. I served there first as Additional Deputy Commissioner (Development) from 1990 to 1992, and then as Deputy Commissioner from 1992 to 1996. At that time, the district then included what is today Tarn Taran, and together the area had, to my recollection, the highest concentration of ex-servicemen in Punjab — around five lakh. For roughly six years, therefore, I had sustained engagement with the concerns of ex-servicemen, not merely as Deputy Commissioner and District Magistrate, but also as ex officio Chairman of the District Sainik Welfare Board.

What one learns very quickly in such a district is that the problems of ex-servicemen cannot be reduced to pensions, canteen facilities, liquor quotas, or the occasional welfare function. Those are the visible and administratively manageable aspects. The deeper difficulties begin when the soldier returns to civilian life, usually still relatively young, often around the age of thirty-five, and in the prime of his physical capacity.

He returns to a social world that has moved on without him. Agricultural land may be under the occupation or control of brothers, cousins, or other collaterals. Village equations may have hardened. In some cases, those around him have quietly come to treat his absence as permanent and his rights as negotiable. What awaits him is not always honour, reintegration, and support; very often it is contest, indifference, and procedural exhaustion.

To this is added a civil administration that frequently fails to understand the peculiar vulnerability of the returning soldier. He is trained in discipline, chain of command, and clarity of responsibility. What he often encounters instead is slackness, delay, unclear process, and an absence of ownership in field offices, even in matters as trivial as the renewal of an arms licence. He runs from pillar to post, often without guidance, even for matters as basic as certificates, entitlements, or reservation claims for himself and his children. It was in dealing with such cases, over year after year, that I realised how shallow our prevailing notion of resettlement really was.

The Civilian State and the Returning Soldier

The official imagination of ex-servicemen’s rehabilitation has long been too narrow. It assumes that the returning soldier can somehow be absorbed through low-paid security employment, a few skilling programmes, or a routine package of self-employment schemes, loans, and subsidies. In practice, much of this goes nowhere.

Many jawans, junior commissioned officers, and non-commissioned officers are highly disciplined, trainable, and technically capable, but not necessarily equipped for the arbitrary and often predatory logic of small business in the civilian marketplace.

Far too many eventually land up in petty security jobs through contractors who extract twelve hours of duty without overtime beyond eight. This happens despite the fact that many of them possess formal training in valuable trades — automobile maintenance, electrical work, communications, logistics, and a host of other practical skills. My own approach in Amritsar was shaped by this understanding. Within the constraints of office, I gave disproportionate attention to the problems of ex-servicemen. I say this not in self-congratulation, but to illustrate the practical consequences of sensitisation.

My concern was directed less towards sipping tea with retired generals, socialising with the senior military brass, or participating in the golf-course circuit through which segments of the civil administration often relate to the Army. I was never a golfer and remain none. My instinct was to focus rather on the jawan, the JCO, the NCO, and the family at the village level, because that is where the sharper, less visible distress lay. That instinct, I am convinced, had much to do with what I had seen as a probationer.

A “Minor” Department That Turned Out to Be “Major”

The same orientation carried forward when I was posted as Administrative Secretary of the Defence Services Welfare Department in the Punjab Government after I had reached the supertime scale. Many people viewed the posting as a downgrade. I had been moved from what was then regarded as the far more important and high-profile assignment of Chief Administrator, PUDA, when PUDA was still a single, unified authority rather than the multiple bodies that now exist. The Defence Services Welfare Department, on the other hand, was widely regarded as a backwater with little to do. Yet that assumption quickly proved misplaced. I soon discovered that the department had been accorded more weight within government than was commonly imagined, for no fewer than three of my immediate predecessors had all been officers at least senior to me in service by nearly two decades.

When Captain Amarinder Singh came to power in 2002, he placed me in charge of this department. Significantly, no Cabinet Minister had been allotted its portfolio, which meant that my files went directly to the Chief Minister.

The Chief Secretary at the time, Y. S. Ratra, was himself an Emergency Commissioned Officer and an ex-serviceman. In that setting, well-considered proposals moved with unusual speed. Finance, Legal Remembrancer, and Personnel cleared our files with a degree of ease seldom encountered in government, and we were able to undertake a series of proactive measures.

Changing Rules, Not Merely Processing Files

Among the most important was the clarification and amendment of the statutory Punjab Recruitment of Ex-Servicemen Rules, 1982, which provide roughly thirteen per cent reservation in direct recruitment for ex-servicemen. There had long been ambiguity over the position of dependent daughters — whether a daughter who was married, divorced, or widowed could still be treated as a dependent for this purpose. We made the rules clear. If the ex-serviceman himself was available and possessed the requisite qualifications, the benefit would go to him in the first instance. But in those many categories of posts — college lecturerships, for example — where the qualification threshold was beyond the reach of most ex-servicemen, the benefit would pass to lineal descendants, sons and daughters alike, irrespective of the daughter’s marital status. That was both fair and administratively sound.

I also wanted to go beyond rules and create a more durable institutional support structure. Through the Punjab Ex-Servicemen Corporation (PESCO), I had envisaged a dedicated sector in Mohali for ex-servicemen and their families. My eyes were on Sector 81, which we had acquired in PUDA. But stronger institutional interests intervened, and the proposal was torpedoed. Today those areas house major institutions such as the Indian School of Business and other educational establishments. History moved in a different direction. Yet I continue to believe that a dedicated ex-servicemen’s enclave would have been a visionary measure.

At the implementation level, I was able to clear a substantial number of long-pending allotment cases concerning ex-servicemen in PUDA and other authorities. I took a particularly firm line against the misuse of old powers of attorney. I insisted that the ex-serviceman himself appear personally with identification documents to claim plots at concessional prices under the relevant policy. That helped ensure that the actual beneficiary, rather than a manipulative intermediary, secured the advantage.

PESCO and the Search for Dignified Civilian Roles

As interim Chairman-cum-Managing Director of PESCO, the Punjab Ex-Servicemen Corporation, I also sought to translate welfare into economic opportunity. Through competitive tendering, we secured orders for the wives and widows of ex-servicemen for stitching uniforms for military and paramilitary forces. We negotiated deployment of ex-servicemen for security duties at the Ranjit Sagar Dam and later in the Shahpurkandi Dam project, thereby relieving the Punjab Police of a demanding assignment while simultaneously creating structured employment. Over time, PESCO also became the default security provider for a number of Punjab government boards and corporations.

These may appear modest initiatives viewed individually, but collectively they strengthened the civilian role and post-service employability of ex-servicemen. One episode from that period remains vivid. The Chief Minister was flying from Patiala to Jalandhar in the monsoon season of 2002 to address a large ex-servicemen’s rally. He asked me to brief him en route regarding the welfare measures being taken. As I outlined the initiatives, he said, in substance, “So these are the plans we have.” I replied, “No, Sir, these are not merely plans. These are measures you have already approved, and notifications have already been issued.” The rally was a roaring success.

Honour, Gratitude, and the Families of the Fallen

Around the same period, we were also confronted with the rehabilitation of the families of the Kargil martyrs and those affected by Operation Parakram. Through a committee headed by the Chief Secretary, we were able to steer through what were effectively appointments made in honour and gratitude to the qualified next of kin of the fallen. Young widows, and in a number of cases grown-up sons and daughters, were considered for posts such as PCS, Excise and Taxation, tehsildari, and other services depending on their educational qualifications.

There was resistance from administrative departments, as there almost always is when moral urgency collides with bureaucratic routine. But with the political support of the Chief Minister, the close involvement of the Chief Secretary, himself an ex-serviceman, and persistent coordination at our level, we were able to carry these measures through. In at least one memorable case, the daughter of a martyred brigadier entered service as a PCS officer and later rose into the IAS, where she has acquitted herself admirably in both field and staff postings. I leave the name aside. The point is larger than the individual case. A system can act with gratitude and imagination if it chooses to.

War Widows, Delayed Justice, and Cabinet Intervention

My engagement with these issues did not end there. During my two stints as Financial Commissioner, Revenue — one spanning the transition from the Akali government in 2016–17 into Captain Amarinder Singh’s government, and another from 2019 to 2020 — I found to my dismay that war widows and disabled soldiers of the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars were still wandering, often on critches, through the corridors of government in search of benefits promised long ago. Some continued to seek allotment of land that had never materialised. Others possessed paper allotments but had not been given actual possession. In several cases, claims had been rejected on flimsy and mechanical grounds, including the plea that their claim was time-barred.

We took these cases to the Cabinet, during the government of Parkash Singh Badal. In the majority of them, a cash grant of Rs. 50 lakh was sanctioned for the widow, and where she had unfortunately passed away, for her legal heirs. This brought delayed but meaningful relief to families that had already borne sacrifice and neglect. When I reflect on why these matters affected me so deeply, I return again to that Army attachment. Because I had seen something of the soldier’s world from the inside, and not merely its ceremonial face, I could not treat such files as routine administrative clutter.

Why This Was Personal as Well as Institutional

There was, perhaps, also a more personal reason. My own father, a PCS officer, laid down his life in January 1972 in Gurdaspur district while distributing relief in war-affected and war-ravaged areas in the aftermath of the 1971 Indo-Pak war. Sacrifice in the service of the nation was therefore never entirely abstract in my own life. That personal memory deepened what the Army attachment had begun: an inability to remain indifferent to the plight of those who serve, or of the families left to deal with the long shadow of service.

Even after retirment from the IAS, the issue has remained alive in my mind. On Army Day, in one of my public posts, I had pointed out that while the nation dutifully pays tribute to its brave hearts, it has conspicuously failed to harness the tremendous energy and potential of young soldiers who retire around the age of thirty-five with only modest pension support. I had noted then that despite the existence of the Director General Resettlement at the Government of India level and Departments of Ex-Servicemen Welfare in the States, our record in properly rehabilitating retired jawans remains patchy.

The Unfinished Agenda

Five years after my superannuation from the IAS on 31 July 2021, I look back with some pride at what I was able to do. But I am equally conscious of an unfinished agenda. One proposal to which I attached considerable importance was the creation of a dedicated and standing recruitment board for ex-servicemen on the lines of the Punjab Subordinate Services Selection Board. In my view, such a mechanism was essential if statutory reservations and service entitlements were to be translated into actual appointments with speed, regularity, and seriousness. That proposal was torpedoed by vested interests.

The consequence is visible even today. A large number of vacancies earmarked for ex-servicemen continue to lie unfilled, despite the availability in many cases of qualified ex-servicemen or their lineal descendants. This remains one of the clearest examples of the gap between policy on paper and justice in practice. Even after retirement, I have continued to raise this issue with senior retired ex-servicemen. Yet one often finds that organised advocacy remains heavily focused on high-visibility questions such as One Rank, One Pension (OROP). Those issues are important, but they do not exhaust the everyday difficulties of the ordinary veteran.

There is also, if one may say so candidly, a tendency among some in the senior retired ranks to look upwards towards prestigious constitutional or quasi-constitutional appointments, while the everyday problems of jawans, NCOs, JCOs, disabled soldiers, widows, and dependants continue largely unresolved. Meanwhile, the larger structural environment is changing. The old model in which military service often supported a stable inter-generational family legacy may weaken further as the Agniveer scheme takes hold. At the same time, the proportion of Punjabi youth entering the armed forces appears to be declining. That should concern Punjab deeply. It should concern the Union as well.

A Better Deal for All Ranks

India owes its ex-servicemen a far better deal than it currently offers. This is true at every level — jawans, NCOs, JCOs, commissioned officers, war widows, disabled soldiers, and lineal descendants trying to convert promised entitlements into actual opportunity. Our gratitude cannot remain confined to speeches, wreaths, Army Day hashtags, and occasional ceremonial sentiment. It must be institutional, practical, and continuous. It must be seen in recruitment, land, resettlement, housing, skill recognition, welfare delivery, and the dignity with which the returning soldier is treated by the civil state.

The retired jawan deserves more than exploitative contractor-driven security work. The JCO and NCO deserve more than token honour and bureaucratic indifference. The commissioned officer, often retiring while still capable of substantial public contribution, deserves a more imaginative national framework of reintegration. Widows deserve speedy justice, not decades of paperwork. Children and lineal descendants deserve rules that are clear, fair, and actually implemented.

The Larger Lesson for the Judiciary and the State

All this brings me back to where I began. My original suggestion regarding judicial officers was neither rhetorical provocation nor anti-judicial sentiment. It was a plea for institutional humility. Those who exercise authority over the lives of others should have at least some direct acquaintance with the conditions they order, administer, or impose.

The civil servant who is asked to work with the Army benefits from seeing the soldier’s world. The magistrate who remands a citizen to lock-up or jail would benefit from seeing those conditions for himself or herself. The policymaker who frames rehabilitation schemes should understand how a retired soldier actually lives. Power ought not to be exercised in sterile abstraction.

Would a week in an Army unit solve the failures of ex-servicemen’s resettlement? No. Would one night in a police station and one night in a district jail solve the problems of the criminal justice system? Again, no. But such exposure, especially in the early stages of the career, can alter temperament. It can shake complacency. It can create a frame of reference that reappears years later — in the field, on the file, in the Cabinet note, in the recruitment rule, in the welfare order, in the allotment dispute, and in the exercise of discretion. It can make one pause before becoming mechanical. It can make empathy part of administrative reasoning.

Conclusion: Governance Needs Experience, Not Abstraction Alone

That, at any rate, is what it did for me. If I gave disproportionate time to ex-servicemen as Deputy Commissioner, if I pushed their causes in the Defence Services Welfare Department, if I tried to strengthen their recruitment entitlements, if I worked to find economic roles for their widows and families, if I pressed for honour-and-gratitude appointments, if I intervened for forgotten war widows decades later as Financial Commissioner, Revenue, and if I continue even now to advocate unfinished reforms, it is because that early exposure stayed with me. It did not make me sentimental. It made me attentive.

If my modest public suggestion about sensitising judicial officers has reopened that conversation, it has served a useful purpose. In the end, the issue is larger than the judiciary, larger than the civil services, and even larger than ex-servicemen. It concerns the moral quality of governance itself. A republic is judged not only by the laws it frames, but by the degree to which those entrusted with authority understand the human consequences of their decisions.

Exposure cannot guarantee wisdom. But without exposure, wisdom is too often replaced by procedure, and empathy by habit. That is a dangerous trade for any public institution to make.

March 29, 2026