Agnipath, a chance to transform India’s defense management

Now that India’s government has chosen the four-year tour of duty model as the way to respond to its budget constraint, the policy challenge is to ensure that it achieves the desired objectives, mitigates the downsides and pre-empts unintended consequences. Essentially, it is about understanding who might join the armed forces given these employment conditions, and how this new demographic will change the defence services and Indian society at large.