Outgoing Army Chief General Manoj Pande on Sunday received the Guard of Honour on his last day in office. Pande is retiring after a stint of 26 months. On his last day in office, General Pande also paid homage at the National War Memorial, Delhi.
General Pande took over as the 29th Chief of Army Staff on April 30, 2022 from General Manoj Mukund Naravane. An alumnus of the National Defence Academy, Gen Pande was commissioned in December 1982 in the Corps of Engineers (The Bombay Sappers).
In his distinguished military career spanning four decades, he tenanted important and challenging command and staff appointments in different operational environments including command of an Engineer Brigade in the Western Theatre, as part of Strike Corps, an Infantry Brigade along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, a Mountain Division in the High Altitude Area of Western Ladakh and command of a Corps, deployed along the Line of Actual Control and in Counter Insurgency Operations area of Eastern Command.
General Manoj Pande will be succeeded by Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi who will take over the command as the next Army chief on Sunday. Incidentally, Lt Gen Dwivedi's classmate, Admiral Dinesh Tripathi, recently took over the command of the Indian Navy on May 1.
Navy Chief Admiral Dinesh Tripathi and Army Chief Designate Lt Gen Upendra studied at the Sainik School in Madhya Pradesh's Rewa. Both of them were together in school from class 5th-A in the early 1970s.