NEW DELHI: The Union government has sanctioned the creation of a 24,000-personnel deputation reserve within the existing manpower of the five Central armed police forces and Assam Rifles in a bid to ensure better promotion avenues, fresh recruitment of personnel and ensuring quality manpower for a variety of internal security tasks.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued an order on Tuesday for creation of a 23,958 ‘deputation reserve’ in the CRPF, BSF, ITBP, CISF, SSB and Assam Rifles.
These five Central armed police forces (CAPFs) apart from the Assam Rifles are deployed for undertaking various internal security duties like counter-terrorist operations, border guarding and conduct of elections and maintenance of law and order across the country.
They are also the primary manpower feeders of various specialised deputationist organisations like the Special Protection Group (SPG), the National Security Guard (NSG), the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the Intelligence Bureau (IB) among others. These agencies function under the MHA which is responsible for India’s internal security.
Deputation reserves are intended to serve as substitutes for regular duty posts in the event of service officers (holding these duty posts) being temporarily away from their cadre on deputation to any other organisation.
The organisations who seek deputation from these forces will also get a constant supply of deputationist officials as compared to the current times when there arises a shortage of quality personnel to be sent to specialised forces in the counter-terrorist and disaster rescue domain like the NSG and the NDRF respectively, apart from others.
The maximum of the ‘deputation reserve’ posts at 6,733 have been created in the Border Security Force that has a strength of about 2.65 lakh personnel followed by the Central Reserve Police Force at 5,765 (total strength 3.25 lakh), Indo-Tibetan Border Police at 4,764 (about 90,000 in strength), Sashastra Seema Bal 2,669 (about 80,000 staffers), Central Industrial Security Force at 2,298 (1.80 lakh in strength) and Assam Rifles at 1,729 (about 65,000 in strength).