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Old soldiers never die — they simply fade away, as the old song goes.

That, precisely, is the sorry story of Indian logistics. Growing numbers of officers in the Indian Army are moving on to lucrative careers as managers in the industry, but none of them gives a fig for the fauji drivers in the non-commissioned ranks he’s served with.

It’s an observation Lt. Gen. Vishnu Kant Chaturvedi corroborates. A retired officer takes a “good while” to find his feet in the world of private corporations, but when he does it’s all about his own personal advancement from then on, the gunner-for-life from the 99 Forward Regiment (Sylhet) concedes.

That the vast reserve of veterans from the finest fighting force in the world should go untapped while their ex-superiors devote all their energies to climbing the corporate ladder is a tragedy of national proportions. The indifference to ESMs certainly isn’t the fault of fleet owners alone. Gagan Chaturvedi says he’s encountered it on more than one occasion, and it makes him marvel.

In 2017, as managing director of G-Trans Logistics (India), he faced an inexplicable resistance from a former Army major, operations manager at an e-commerce giant, to the deployment of a fleet of 100 light trucks he’d just bought to service the bulk of that company’s express delivery requirements in the NCR, that he planned to man with teams of fauji drivers.

Instead of the 100 agreed on, the contract he was given was for 30 trucks only. The perfidious ex-major quit in short order and set up his own transport business to corner the balance. Not only did he not employ a single fauji himself; he left Gagan no choice but to cap his own fauji driver hires at 25 — and to seek the patronage of a leading e-comm competitor to keep those expensive CNG trucks running.