Tribune News Service
Panchkula, November 10

About 20 military veterans from the tricity and the adjoining areas handed over their medals to the Panchkula administration as a mark of protest against the “truncated” one rank, one pension (OROP) scheme here today.
Nearly 150 veterans assembled at Major Sandeep Sankhla Memorial in Sector 2 this morning and 20 of them put their medals, totalling about 150, in a box, which was later handed over to Panchkula Additional Deputy Commissioner (ADC) Hema Sharma at the district Secretariat. Those who participated in the event included two retired major generals — Maj Gen Pushpinder Singh and Maj Gen Dhillon, and an aged veteran, Col IJS Ahluwalia, besides several officers of the rank of Brigadier.
The veterans also handed over a memorandum to the ADC for onward submission to Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with the medals. The memorandum urged the Prime Minister to keep his repeated promises made earlier regarding implementing the OROP in letter and spirit as defined by the Parliament’s standing committee on defence and to ensure the well-being of the armed forces and its personnel to ensure national interest.
Brig Kiran Krishan (retd) said a majority of the military veterans from the region had already returned their medals in Delhi during an agitation for the implementation of the OROP. “The veterans are angry, and feel betrayed and cheated by a government that has been shouting from rooftops that it has given the OROP to the military and even issued a full-page advertisement in this regard. What the notification states is anything but the OROP in letter and spirit,” he said.