Inclusive Management of Ex-servicemen in India: Satisfaction of Air Force Veterans from Resettlement Facilities with Special Reference to Tamil Nadu
To ensure a youthful profile of the armed forces in India, each year an estimated 70,000 personnel of the army, navy and the air force are released from the services. Resettlement of such personnel, called ex-servicemen, is an important management function at both the macro and micro socio-economic levels. Ex-servicemen constitute highly versatile and well trained human resources that need to be utilised for inclusive development of all stakeholders. Hence, it is of paramount importance to provide satisfactory facilities in the resettlement of such ex-service veterans. The purpose of this research paper is to study the satisfaction levels of ex-servicemen in India from resettlement facilities with special reference to Tamil Nadu. We identified the significant facilities in resettlement through personal administration of questionnaires, focus group interviews, interactions with stakeholders and a pilot study.
This study is focussed on ex-servicemen of the Indian Air Force, who are also called air (force) veterans in contemporary parlance. We focus on one Indian state, Tamil Nadu that houses more than 6% of the ex-servicemen population in India. Further, the spotlight of the survey is on the districts of Coimbatore and the Nilgiris, which represent, respectively, the relatively developed and underdeveloped regions of Tamil Nadu and in turn that of India. We determined the stratified sample sizes (N=400) through inferential statistical techniques.
The study comprehensively considered 10 facilities in resettlement, and measured the satisfaction levels of veterans on a five point Likert scale. Hypothesis testing between satisfaction level and demographic and psychographic variables of veterans revealed interesting insights. Discriminant analysis provided us a model for grouping the veterans into low and high satisfaction groups by identifying the relative importance of profile variables. There is significant disparity in satisfaction levels between veterans in developed and underdeveloped regions. This study concludes with suggestions for inclusive resettlement of veterans.