Five days after the Maoist massacre of 76 CRPF men in Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, it is now evident why they were fodder for the battle-hardened Naxals - only 45 of the 81-strong Company had received guerrilla warfare training to fight the enemy.
Home minister P. Chidambaram may have backed the CRPF men by claiming that they were not poorlytrained as was being alleged, but his own ministry later released a statement contradicting what its boss said.
The statement says only 45 members of the CRPF's 'A' company of the 62nd battalion had completed the 45-day anti-Naxal training at the agency's Counter Insurgency and Terrorism (CIAT) school in Shivpuri (Madhya Pradesh) on March 25 and returned to Dantewada.
The rest of the group - from the 'C' and 'G' companies - which went on the 'area domination' exercise on April 4, had only received basic pre-induction training nearly a year ago when they were first sent to Dantewada.
Sources said these men had been waiting for their turn for almost a year to be trained at either of the CRPF's two CIAT schools in Silchar in Assam and Shivpuri.
Despite their lack of training, they had been posted at Dantewada from early 2009. The schools could not train them owing to their limited training capacity of only around 2,600 personnel a year.
On the other hand, nearly 6,000 men of six battalions of the CRPF's Special Action Force (SAF) commando unit have received a three-month-long guerilla training since 2008 in various batches before deployment in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, all of them Naxal-infested areas.
Four such SAF battalions were operationalised at their bases in Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh, Khunti and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and Bhandara in Maharashtra on April 1 only after they completed the training.
However, according to the home ministry statement, the CRPF's regular battalions are forced to wait to learn survival and combat skills to confront the Naxals.
None of the 81 men of the 62nd Battalion, even the 'A' Battalion, was trained in anti-Naxal warfare by the army, which has otherwise trained 10 battalions of the CRPF, the home ministry admitted.
The statement said: "Pre-induction training was imparted with specific reference to the area in which they were to be inducted. Anti-Naxal training is more intensive training. 'C' company and 'G' company will undergo anti-Naxal training when their turn comes in the cycle. As regards training capacity, the CRPF
has CIAT schools in Silchar and Shivpuri with an annual capacity to train 1,829 personnel and 750 personnel respectively. Four more ad-hoc training schools are being set up, one of which will be for the CRPF."
A CRPF source said that even pre-induction training was a concept started just a year ago by the then DG of CRPF, A.S. Gill, who wanted forces going to Naxal areas to be first familiarised with the terrain rather than just being pushed into action after shifting them from completely different theatres of action such as Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East.
A senior CRPF officer however clarified that the entire 62nd battalion of the CRPF had spent three years fighting the Naxals in Rohtas district of Bihar before being given the Dantewada assignment last year. "It cannot be said that the battalion had no experience in fighting Naxals," he said. "Each of them had received pre-induction training." But a reliable MHA source admitted that the ongoing oneman inquiry by former BSF
director general E.N. Rammohan would expose the tactical shortcomings and the violation of standard operating procedures by the CRPF party.
The source said that the CRPF party had committed cardinal mistakes like not splitting themselves into various small groups while on the exercise, but walking into the ambush in one large group.
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