IN THE sandy, windy, waterless chaos of the desert, the unit headquarters of the 128 Infantry Battalion near Bikaner is like something out of a colonial novel -- an island of decorum struggling to maintain its whitewashed flagstones and flower gardens against the better sensibilities of nature. Its thornbush fencing encloses mud huts, with clay commodes and desert coolers for the officers, tents for the "other ranks" (OR), an officer's mess, an arsenal, a temple and a medical inspection room.

In the large mess tent, where knives and forks seem strangely out of place, waiters serve fresh vegetables which are brought in every day from Bikaner, 60 kilometres from the unit. A few kilometres away, under the scorching sun, retired servicemen plant saplings in the sand.

The unit's manpower of 9 officers, 14 JCOs and 6,355 OR, is divided into 3 companies -- Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Each company is allotted an area for plantation.

The companies are involved in block plantation work and sand dune stabilisation along the Rajasthan canal. With the temperature hitting the 40s every summer, the soil thirsty for water and the wind and sand burying saplings within 3 days of their being planted, the task is anything but easy. But while the battalion, which started work in 1983, aims to cover 10,829 hectares by 1995, the forest department claims to have already treated 30,000 hectares since 1991. And for much less money.

As the AIG (Forests) Ajay Kumar, points out, one of the reasons for their high costs is because the units are top heavy, with too large an administrative staff. Could the units do better with fewer people on the top?

Army officials don't think so. They believe that to get the ex-servicemen to deliver their best, they have to work under conditions similar to those when they were actually serving in the army. And the administrative staff, they say, is needed to maintain discipline.