WHY NDA NEEDS AN HONEST & SOUL SEARCHING REVIEW AND THE JUSTIFICATION FOR REFORMS - By Nixon Fernando
- Nixon Fernando
- 19 hours ago
- 17 min read
Date :- 07 September 2026
EDITOR'S NOTE
This well articulated article by Nixon Fernando gives a realistic overview of the military training curriculum at NDA . It covers several aspects of ' tough military training ' - the good, the bad and the ugly ! Its an honest introspection of what the cadet at NDA actually undergoes during his three years ( 6 terms ) of tough military training at NDA . The points that Nixon highlights are not new and have been brought out ,endorsed or complemented many times over by several authors, who themselves have been NDA alumni ,and well documented in articles published in Victory India Campaign books ,Fauji India Magazine and Mission Victory India website/news portal/ think tank for past 15 years ( 2012 - 2026 ) . All these are available for review/ examination / scrutiny for any keen or interested readers ,analysts or research scholars/ students .
The aim and objective of the 15 years old Victory India Campaign ( VIC) and Mission Victory India ( MVI) has been / is to improve the quality of our military leadership at all levels . This process started (and continues even today) with its primary aim of highlighting and removing the identified flaws,shortcomings and weaknesses in our officer selection and training systems especially at NDA ,IMA , OTA ,AFA & INA .
NDA has been and continues to be the main source ( Gangotri ) of military leadership . It has been amply and elaborately highlighted by Nixon Fernando that this elite world class institution has overtime got polluted and needs a serious soul searching review to eradicate / remove the shortcomings ,drawbacks and wrong practices that have over the years / decades crept in and taken roots at the very foundation of the training of cadets , its ethos, norms, culture and traditions, especially in the squadrons where the cadets spend maximum time during their 3 years training duration. Many former cadets have called / dubbed training at NDA as 'going through hell' . What does it actually mean ? This has been amply described by some ex NDA authors who have narrated their bitter experiences with honest confessions. These too are available for reading and reference for anybody genuinely interested in removing the identified flaws that continue to cause great harm to cadets .
After 15 years of relentless pursuit by VIC / MVI and so much well documented evidence/ proof it is high time that the NDA is reviewed by a high level interservices & academic review & reforms committee . The Chairman and all Members of this committee must have an open mind and detached approach. All the committee members should owe and swear allegiance to the nation ,the flag and the constitution , allegiance or loyalty to own alma mater should be secondary !
Kindly enter your comments on MVI website in readers column at end of this article or forward to Editor, MVI .
RELEVANT READING
Regards and Best Wishes,
Col Vinay B Dalvi,
Editor MVI & VIC
WHY NDA NEEDS AN HONEST & SOUL SEARCHING REVIEW ?
An institution that is focused on excellence will explore ways by which it can do what it does even better. An outstanding institution will be open to self-analysis, will be ever alert to tune up to global best practices, and will find its home in the assurance that it is up to speed on everything that matters to excellence.
Is the NDA afraid of taking an honest look at itself? Is it afraid that, what it claims to be “Tough military training”, will be found wanting in some way? Is it afraid that it will deny the alumni a feather in the cap which it always thought it had? Will it bring judgment on the ex-NDAs as a class?
And is all of this, which worries the prestige of the NDA, important? Should NDA be handled with kid gloves especially when what is at stake is the future leadership in the armed forces, the future effectiveness of the Indian military and the future of the nation?
So, the fundamental question is this: is NDA the best that it can be? Is there no scope for improvement?
If someone carries this idea that the NDA is already the best that can be, then it is a delusion indeed: because, if it was already there, then there should be a beeline of requests from foreign nations seeking to get their citizens trained in the NDA. May be once upon a time NDA was counted amongst the places the best of soldiers aspired to graduate from. But that is not the case now. The NDA can count itself worthy only if candidates from the developed nations too would request to be trained here. And even then, the NDA should be open for opportunities to grow. Without a doubt, there is scope for improvement.
And despite credible efforts from persons heading the NDA, there is a stagnation of sorts. The tragic part is that changes ultimately seem to be happening on the basis of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) factor alone. The latest is of course the fact that the NDA had to take in lady cadets because the Supreme Court said it should. As a consequence the NDA has ever since started adjusting itself to handle this added task. And one hot on the anvil, even today, is the seeming hesitation in the NDA to do justice to the former cadets who unfortunately had to get boarded out. Why is there such blindness or inertia in even finding a way to deliver due justice to the unfortunate cadets that had to drop out? Yes, the law says that they get no compensation and cannot ask for it. But what is holding back the NDA and the government in seeing that the case deserves to be dealt with greater fairness and therefore relevant bottlenecks or hurdles in law need to be removed? Why is the system being so heartless? Why are they waiting for the Supreme Court to intervene and say ‘TINA’?
To suggest that the top leadership at the NDA is not sincere in this pursuit of bettering the NDA is the wrong conclusion to arrive at. There is sincerity, but as one Commandant, who went on to be Naval Chief, famously said: “You should not put your finger into the NDA machine, your finger will be cut”. It is his tongue-in-cheek translation of the Hindi equivalent “Ungali math karna, ungali katjayegi”. The intense scrutiny of the system, by many experts in Mission Victory India, point out to the fact that there are many factors even beyond the gates of the NDA that play a role in what happens at the academy. It is not so simple that it can be reversed through orders passed at one or the other place in the entire hierarchy of the armed forces—even exclusively by the commandant of the NDA or the chief even. And yet it is one’s moral duty to at least try; and it is heartening to observe that we have had officers who have weighed heavily on this.
There are many insightful articles by outstanding military minds in Mission Victory India (MVI). The writers, with long years of experience, some being specialists in psychology, some from the medical field, with people who have headed the NDA and have occupied high ranking and significant posts in the Indian Military, civilian officers who have spent their entire careers in the NDA, even close external observers of the NDA, former cadets, cadets’ parents, all of them together represent a significantly wide spectrum. And there seems to be unanimity and very little credible intellectual counter to the call for drastic change in some of the things happening at the NDA. And even so there is heavy inertia, an unreasoned resistance, something impeding movement of the NDA towards thorough and critically needed reform.
As the articles show, the challenges that need addressing on ground are many. Among these are: the short tenures of commandants, policy flip flops, independent squadron traditions, secretiveness, military civilian disharmony, disproportionately high amounts of unstructured training compared to structured training, command over juniors without care for them, ignoring the need for basic fitness at intake, limited accountability of authorities in the academy, excessive stress on brawn rather than brain, and many more. And as one looks into the arguments put forth by those who have closely observed the NDA from various stand points, it becomes evident that a lot of things currently happening cannot be justified, and a systematic review of the entire system is long overdue.
The review must start with revisiting the list of goals that the NDA was initially designed to address at inception. It must then look at the changes have happened in the environment of the nation ever since, and then arrive at a new list of goals for the NDA, which are relevant to the nation and its armed forces today. Once there is clarity on the goals, it would be easy to follow up on what needs to be done with the entire training at the NDA. After all, it came into existence to serve a national cause. Is everyone employed in the NDA aware of what that task is? Is each stakeholder contributing towards it?
And as one goes through the volumes written on the subject, and looks into the realities of the present moment, one becomes aware that there is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed first. On the surface it makes an appearance as something that makes the NDA unique. It is considered the cause that makes NDA great. That it is the magic that mills out brave soldiers in huge numbers from the academy. We shall call it “Tough Military Training”.
The refrain that one gets from the NDA alumni (and they are able to convince many outsiders about it too) is that the NDA training is all about this ‘tough military training’, and that it is the weaklings that do not manage to complete it. They claim that the drop-out rate, however high, is inevitable. Cadets who make it through the NDA supposedly prove their fitness for soldering by taking on this training; and those that fall by the wayside therefore do not have what it takes to be a soldier.
A serving COAS had once dismissed the 10+ percentage of the dropout/attrition rate saying that the nation can bear this loss. The indirect suggestion is that the “tough military training” is a process that the nation accepts because the quality must be maintained. And when that is the attitude, and when the officers high in the armed forces hierarchy cease to take this matter up, shift focus on to other matters which they feel is more pressing, the stagnation happens. The situation in the NDA and in other training institutions do not get the necessary attention required.
So, we have this “Tough Military Training” at the NDA, which has great inertia, and it is credited with making cadets fit for the role that is ahead of them. And surely it is a fact that the alumni have gone on to achieve the highest of distinctions in the armed forces—both, high positions and significant battle honors. And the distinguished amongst those honored in battle have blazed a trail that can inspire soldiers from around the world. So how can the NDA be wrong in any way? And there we are, what change can we expect at the NDA when this is the attitude? The alumnus say it is fine, the awards prove it, and yet we know it is a delusion. NDA does not exist in the zone of global excellence as yet. And the experts looking into the academy point out that fundamental corrections can make a difference.
THE JUSTIFICATION FOR REFORMS
We Indians take pride in our soldiers being some of the best in the world. Is it just jingoism or then is there some truth to it? Without a doubt there is historical evidence for it. Indian soldiers have done extremely well in the WW2, in UN missions and in India’s own skirmishes with its neighbors.
This could be credited to the processes in the British Indian Army which selected and groomed soldiers in the great regiments of the British Indian armed forces. But the indigenous soldiers that fought against these very British regiments were no mean soldiers either. A little thought shows that there is civilizational depth that delivers its own strength to the solders of the land. This is very similar to the way it was demonstrated in Iran recently. Early in the Iran-US war, almost the entire military leadership of Iran was decapitated, but the US-Israel combine has found it difficult to enforce a regime change; a credible military response re-emerged from the nation. One American commentator remarked, “they will even throw the kitchen sink at us… They will get back at us with everything they got”. The point is that it is not just the government that responds, the entire nation fights back. The culture of the ancient Indian land is similar to this. It can inspire, in each soldier, a mindset of selfless soldiering capable of even the ultimate sacrifice. And such mindset is especially manifest in those who are taught to believe that they inherit the heroism of ancient warriors of repute; who in turn are reported in history, narrated about in legends and/or described in the scriptures.
Now, owing to the fact that the NDA attracts a major chunk of aspiring soldier-leaders of the nation, it is not unreasonable to see that the NDA is actually a funnel; it attracts these tradition-inspired youth and sets them on the path of getting commissioned as military leaders. And therefore, it must be no surprise that amongst the officers that have received the highest military honors, both during war and peace time, the ex-NDAs figure in them in unusually large numbers. The best of the inspired potential soldiers of the Indian nation, who are aware of the system, seek out the NDA and try to make it through the SSBs. In other words, the remarkable performance of the ex-NDAs, on the battle field, has a lot to do with the fact that the caliber of the input itself is high.
Everything militarily excellent about an ex-NDA cannot be credited to the processes that happen in the NDA alone. Take the case of Captain Vikram Bhatra for instance: if one were to pursue the interviews given by members of his family, or go by what the boy Vikram is known to have been before he joined the NDA, it would be evident that his pre-NDA years—sixteen or seventeen years in all—had already molded his attitude, long before he stepped into the NDA portals. The NDA did not create Param Veer Vikram Bhatra, it merely taught him the nitty-gritty of his craft, and fortunately, did not kill his inspiration.
And in any case, if we still want to persist with measuring the worth of the NDA on the basis of outcomes, surely a more comprehensive look must be taken. One needs to reckon the balance between the numbers of the decorated NDA alumni on the one hand and the numbers of those that did not rise to the occasion, or worse, those who were disciplined/court-martialed because of what they did, or did not do, on the battlefield. And one wonders whether such a study has indeed been made. And if so, what were the outcomes? Does the system have the courage to assess this honestly in the first place…?
Besides that, if, for checking out the credibility of the NDA, one was to focus just on the physical outcome over the six terms, the optics would look spectacular. A chubby first termer, who could hardly do a 100-meter dash in 14 seconds passes out as one that can do second-class rope six terms later. This, visual transformation of sorts, can give an impression that a soldier got created there at the academy, but we know that we should not be so influenced by the external factor. Physical fitness should not be misunderstood to be something that distinguishes either the soldier or the military academy.
In any case, if one would like to talk of NDA operating at excellence in physical training, then one must not compare the fitness of the sixth term cadets with the fitness of civilians obtaining a degree in a normal university. Rather ne must compare the cadets for their fitness with the fitness to football or boxing professionals coming out of sports academies for instance. And the same applies to all aspects of training at the NDA.
In other words, the real question that must be addressed, in order to check for the significance of the processes within the NDA, is this: What is the delta factor that is gained by the cadets in the field of education, fitness, military skills, military knowledge, personality, leadership—the whole package? Is that delta factor in the league of excellence or then is it just average or mediocre as in any run-of-the-mill military academy … or then is it negative on any count…?!
Bringing in diamonds and sending out polished sparkling diamonds is a credible aim alright. Bringing in graphite and converting them to diamonds seems to be too much of a claim. Does ‘Tough Military Training’ really achieve that? And then, bringing in diamonds and sending out well designed graphite is not what NDA should achieve in any of its alumnus for sure.
The complaint against NDA is not that outstanding military leaders do not come out of the NDA. Rather, the complaint is that the Delta factor is not efficiently pitched at excellence. The young Indian officer, a few years into his commission, has undergone a life-long process that starts at birth. His childhood happens, then NDA, then finishing academies and finally he is baptized as a soldier into the military unit. How right then is it to argue that it was NDA that made someone the military man that he is? There is a contribution from NDA alright, but it is just part of the whole thing.
And it cannot be argued that everything that happens at the NDA has the approval of the best of personality development coaches, best of excellent military leaders, best of knowledgeable psychologists or genuine spiritual lights that are recognized for their knowlerience (knowledge + experience) on matters of the spirit.
What really happens, on ground in the NDA, is that there is a beeline for ensuring a ‘tough military training’, and no one can really put a finger on what it really means. It is almost like the spiritual masters say, ‘it has to be lived to be realized’. And in the process of ensuring ‘tough military training’, there is limited focus on ensuring a proper balance in the multi dimensionality that is required for grooming leaders.
There is a saying in Tamil that goes, “alavu minjinal, amridamum nandru”; ‘Consuming more than what is specified, even if were the nectar of immortality, is poison’. In the great enthusiasm to make ‘military training’ very ‘tough’, all kinds of activities get added to the cadet’s formal and informal schedule, and very often one wonders whether this training happens to a plan, or whether it happens on the basis of needless and limitless activity that are not optimally constructive. Worse, it causes needless danger, owing to which even promising candidates accidently fall off, or in some cases even get hounded out.
Of these former NDA cadets who fall off, the Supreme Court observes, that those who get medically boarded out of the NDA during training are left ‘high and dry’. What about the cadets who are still in the system? Does the system in the NDA really care about the cadets who are still training there, or then does NDA leave it to the personalities of the authorized stake holders involved there? Does the success of the training actually depend on the formal system that is set in motion or then does it depend on the compassion/wickedness/neglect of the directing staff (DS) and the fellow cadets at the academy?
The attrition rate at the Commando school is high. It is just that some soldiers are not cut out to withstand the rigors of the formal activities designed in the that course. There is nothing like unstructured activity there. This is not the same as what happens at the NDA.
In the NDA, the activities that are designed for cadets, within the formal system, are, maybe, adequate in themselves. They are put in place to ensure that those that undertake the activities end up adequately fit to take on subsequent training at the next academy. Are the cadets already fit to be soldiers when they finish the passing out parade at the NDA? Some exceptional cases maybe. But they have more time in the finishing academies, where they are anyway finally tested for fitness in soldering before getting commissioned. When there is a subsequent process already in place, what is the need to subject the cadets to some severe form of ‘tough military training’? If the aim is to, at a minimum, just obtain an advantage of six months of training over the graduates from the civic street, (who are inducted directly at the finishing academies), what is the need for an un-defined stretch at the NDA?
What is the need to subject the cadets to some severe and undefined form of ‘tough military training’ which is over and above the ‘formal training’, which in turn, is more than enough? And this ‘tough military training’ has, in principle, no defined formal limits.
The NDA is over reaching itself. It would be more than enough if the NDA can ensure that the passing out NDA cadet is on par with the average civilian gentleman cadet, in the finishing academy, who in turn is six months into training there. The focus at the NDA should instead be on enhancing the scholarship content of the would-be military leader as also enhancement of his leadership qualities. As for value building, the focus should be on enhancing the values of truth, gentlemanliness, and initiative rather than induce him to lie, cheat, steal, sham and dodge in order to survive.
This should not be confused with the smartness required for negotiating the role of a spy for instance, or the acumen to handle a tricky situation in a terrorist infested area. For sure that is required. But that is already tested for at entry in the SSB; presence of mind, ability to handle situations under pressure. But it should not become an integral part of one’s lifestyle in which one begins manipulating the system itself. One should be smart enough to pick a pocket without being detected, but one should have the integrity to employ the skill to save a nation (a spy for instance) or another life, not to bolster one’s own pocket. And too much of this could make it a habit (21 days is the psychological threshold) and then may be second nature. Just imagine, if a cadet has to spend most of his three years negotiating the ‘tough military training’ by just dodging it using his ‘smart’ ways.
The problem seems to lie in the very definition of the term “Tough military training”. Can we split it into its components? Does it deal with a domain that is beyond the material body? Surely yes! It is about the toughness of the mind and body—both. And does it also have to do with strengthening the spirit? Yes, surely… But training systems in the scientific civilization and in secular democracy are handicapped on the spiritual count. Comments about the spiritual aspect do not make sense in a scientific setting, and yet it must be delivered to the solder—because soldiering is not like the other professions that do not put the professional on probable path of the ultimate sacrifice.
But then again, whatever this spiritual dimension of the “tough military training” in NDA is, would it ever be better, or more significant and deeper than what the tradition-rich civilization delivers to its citizens in its socio-spiritual grooming? Maybe the toughness is woven into the inspiration, with which the prospect steps into the NDA in the first place.
Psychologists do not speak too hopefully about changing a personality when one has reached his late teens and beyond. The cadet, who is now in his late teens, has much that has already been imprinted on his personality when he was an infant, toddler and a young school going kid. What is it, about his personality, that can really be addressed so late in his grooming years? So, what is this ‘tough military training’, that reaches somewhere unknown and deep, really achieving? Surely this idea about ‘Tough Military Training’ in the context of the NDA, needs to be revisited and checked threadbare for what it stands.
A proper military attitude has to do with matters of the spirit alright, and knowers of spirituality are aware that it takes Gurus to handle that. Even Acharyas will not suffice, let alone untrained cadet seniors giving free rope to their fanciful ideas, and who design squadron traditions that keep getting added into ‘unstructured training’.
So, we see this interesting twist; the NDA distinguishes itself due to its “tough military training”, and it is pretty difficult to define what that ‘very important’ thing is; because it deals with matters related to the human mind and spirit. And so, finally, in the name of “Tough Military Training”, the limited formal system of training in NDA, gets peppered with an unlimited ‘informal/unstructured training’. And the claim is that it really makes outstanding soldiers out of the cadets.
Is there a catch somewhere?
Maybe the scientific civilization does not have the tools to make a proper estimate of what this “Tough Military Training” is really worth. But that handicap does not limit the scholarship of Ancient India or any system that deals with knowledge of the spirit. Maybe it is only through understanding the content that is delivered by the Indian Civilization, and by religions in general, that we will be able to see the true worth of that elephant in the NDA room—Tough Military Training.
AUTHOR'S BIOPROFILE:
Educated in Physics, Business Management and Government studies. University Blue in football for two years. The author of ten books primarily focused on a vision for the nation. Taught physics to cadets at the NDA while actively participating in their training and grooming.Was closely associated with Shri TN Seshan, former CEC & Cabinet Secretary, with his autobiography.
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