OTA intake to rise as young leaders wing planned

“The institute will be known as Young Leaders Training Wing and is planned to be established inside the premises of the Officers Training Academy (OTA) in Chennai. It will focus on developing communication, leadership and team-building skills in soldiers,” Army officials said.

The first batch of 200 soldiers will be trained from September 16 for a period of five months. There are plans for catering to two such batches in a single year. A core team of 10 officers will form the instructional nucleus of the new wing. An internal study of the Army had found that there is an overall shortage of 41.4 per cent in the intake of soldiers as officers.

The Army has a varied intake schedule for its prospective officers and recruiting from an available pool of qualified soldiers is one of them. “However, these soldiers during selection at SSB centres have shown a dismal and disappointing success rate of 8.46 per cent. Thus the idea came of establishing the Young Leaders Training Wing, which shall train soldiers to face SSB tests more confidently,” the officials said.

Intake in Young Leaders Training Wing will entail a multi-step process, which will start by identifying the top 500 ACC candidates from a competitive written exam conducted by the Army Education Corps Centre at Pachmarhi. Out of this, 100 will be finally selected after an intensive screening process.