Over 200 Retired Major Generals, Lieutenant Generals to Approach AFT Over Pay, Pension Parity With Juniors

More than 200 retired Major Generals and Lieutenant Generals are preparing to return to the Armed Forces Tribunal in a fresh bid for pay and pension parity with their immediate juniors, after the Ministry of Defence extended relief only to 82 officers who had already won the same dispute in court.

The new petition is being planned after an August 2026 government order stepped up the emoluments of those 82 Major Generals and equivalent officers of the Navy and Air Force, but left a much larger group of similarly placed retirees outside the benefit. Counsel for the earlier petitioners has said a fresh filing before the tribunal is imminent.

Why the officers say they were short-changed

At the heart of the dispute is a long-running anomaly linked to Military Service Pay, or MSP, introduced under the Sixth Central Pay Commission and retained under the Seventh. MSP is payable to commissioned officers only up to Brigadier and equivalent ranks. It is counted for dearness allowance and pension, but officers of General rank and above do not receive it as a separate component.

Under the Seventh Pay Commission matrix, a Brigadier could reach a maximum pay of Rs 2,33,100 when MSP was included. A Major General, however, had a maximum prescribed pay of Rs 2,18,200 without any separate MSP element. In practical terms, some officers found that promotion from Brigadier to Major General reduced their reckonable pay and, later, their pension, leaving them in a worse financial position than an immediate junior who had remained a Brigadier.

That inversion did not end at the two-star level. Officers later promoted to Lieutenant General carried forward the suppressed fixation from their Major General stage into the higher rank. A personal pay mechanism notified in 2023 to bridge the Brigadier–Major General gap was applied narrowly and did not automatically follow officers into subsequent promotion.

The issue is seen by many veterans as a basic service-law principle: promotion should not place an officer at a financial disadvantage compared with an immediate junior, especially when pension is calculated from the last pay drawn.

How the dispute reached the courts

The matter had been under consideration with the government since at least 2019. A batch of petitions filed by Major General-rank officers and their equivalents in the Navy and Air Force was allowed by the Armed Forces Tribunal Principal Bench on 14 March 2023. The tribunal directed the Union government to step up the petitioners’ pay to match that of their immediate juniors, pay arrears from the date they assumed Major General rank until superannuation, and revise pension and all related benefits accordingly.

Those directions were not implemented by the government, even after execution proceedings were initiated. Instead, the Union challenged the tribunal order before the Delhi High Court in a connected matter involving Air Vice Marshal Laxmi Narayan Sharma. The High Court admitted the writ petition, but did not stay the tribunal’s directions. Eighty-two officers then moved contempt petitions against the Defence Secretary and the Controller General of Defence Accounts.

Following notice in those contempt cases, the Ministry of Defence issued a conditional implementation order on 31 August 2026, but it applied only to the named litigants. The order treated the differential as “Personal Pay”, to be counted as pay for all purposes, and allowed arrears and revised pension subject to an undertaking that the money would be refunded if a higher court later overturned the benefit. Similar orders were issued for Navy and Air Force officers who had secured relief from the tribunal. The benefit was not extended across the board to all officers who were similarly affected.

A new petition now being readied

Col Indrasen Singh (Retd), who represented the 82 successful petitioners, has said that more than 200 officers of the ranks of Major General and Lieutenant General have now approached him to seek the same relief through a new case.

“To get it implemented across the board, over 200 officers of the ranks of Maj and Lt Generals have approached me to file a fresh petition in the AFT to obtain a similar order, and I’m moving to the tribunal soon,” he said. He described it as ironic that the government has agreed to step up pay and pension only for those who first had to litigate to obtain a favourable order.

Among those preparing to approach the tribunal is Maj Gen Ranjan Chand (Retd), who commanded an Armoured Division, served as Chief of Staff of a Corps in the Northeast, and later held the appointment of Additional Director General, Mechanised Forces. He has said the ministry’s move removes the anomaly only selectively, benefiting officers who went to court rather than all those similarly placed.

Many of the retired two- and three-star officers now considering litigation are in their seventies and eighties. Critics say they are being forced to spend time and money once again to secure a benefit that has already been recognised as legally valid for their contemporaries.

Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (Retd) has questioned whether the executive, or the judiciary acting on its own, could have prevented hundreds of senior officers from returning to court after a favourable order already exists for 82 of their brother officers. Brig SK Chatterji (Retd) has argued that extending the raise and arrears only to the 82 officers defies logic if the same criterion applies to others.

A note of disagreement among veterans

Not every retired officer agrees that General Officer pay should be automatically equalised with that of the feeder rank of Brigadier. Brig Anil Srivastava (Retd) has pointed out that only about 7 to 10 per cent of Brigadiers are selected for General Officer rank. He has argued that until the Sixth Pay Commission, General Officers received a notional MSP that preserved the pay differential, and that removing that notional element under the Seventh Pay Commission created the present inversion.

Brig Srivastava has also been associated with a writ challenging aspects of the AFT judgment and with execution proceedings involving a larger group of officers.

Observers also note that the government has used personal-pay and stepping-up mechanisms in civil service matters and in earlier defence cases. Critics of the present approach say those remedies could have been applied administratively without requiring every affected cohort to secure a separate tribunal order.

What the next case will seek

The upcoming AFT petition is expected to seek relief similar to the common judgment delivered in March 2023, but for Major Generals, Lieutenant Generals and equivalent ranks who were not included in the August 2026 sanction list. Any fresh tribunal direction would still be subject to the pending Delhi High Court challenge and any further appeal.

The dispute has reopened a familiar question in defence pay matters: whether anomalies created by pay commission changes should be corrected through administrative extension of an already accepted principle, or only after successive rounds of individual litigation. For the officers now preparing to file again, the immediate concern is simple enough — that a Major General or Lieutenant General should not retire on a pension lower than that of a Brigadier who served under him.