Peacekeeping not enough, overworked jawans now stung by beekeeping

The buzz in the central armed police forces (CAPFs) in the past few weeks has been how to keep the bees off, as they are all set to be burdened with another set of dispensable responsibilities.

The forces were stung hard upon being notified about a meeting to be chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla at the North Block of the central secretariat on October 3 to discuss the promotion of scientific beekeeping on the campuses of CAPFs, including the Assam Rifles and the National Security Guard (NSG), the elite counter-terrorism crack unit.

During the meeting, the executive director, National Beekeeping Board, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare, will make a PowerPoint presentation highlighting various aspects of the central sector scheme called the National Beekeeping and Honey Mission, a senior officer in one of the forces told The Federal. The meeting will also discuss “specific requirements of yoga” for the CAPFs, AR, and NSG.

The directors general (DGs) of these forces were notified on September 18 to make it convenient to attend the meeting where a “special module” would be unveiled on how the forces could help promote the beekeeping mission, which is essentially an agro-based activity.

The directive has left a bitter taste in the mouth of a large section of the personnel in the forces.

Burdened with promotional projects

Many of them confided in The Federal that of late, it has become a norm for the Union government to impose on the central forces its promotional projects that even the nodal department or the ministry is not very keen on implementing. “These days, we are trained to do everything other than what we are hired for,” rued a senior official of the Border Security Force (BSF).

He pointed out that while the forces are expected to carry out these needless responsibilities with “full fanfare”, no additional budgetary allocation is made for these. As a result, the monetary burden of holding such events is often passed on to the ration fund of the jawans, considered as “Kuber ka khazana”, to quote the official.

Notably, a video uploaded a few years ago by a BSF jawan, Taj Bahadur Yadav, showed how jawans were served substandard food and how at times they went to sleep on an empty stomach. The video sparked off a controversy, but it highlighted how the jawans’ ration is often compromised.

These non-core roles further weigh down on the already understaffed forces, many a time depriving the jawans of their mandatory eight-hour sleep.

No one to guard borders

An internal report of the BSF dwelt at length on how the core functioning of the border guarding force had been hampered due to a lack of manpower and its frequent deployment in subsidiary functions.

“The magic figure of putting 500 people per unit on the borders has become a myth,” read the confidential report prepared last year, underscoring the problem of manpower shortage the force is fraught with. Frequent withdrawal of border guarding forces to deal with internal disturbance, law and order duties and counter-insurgency operations limits their capabilities to guard the borders effectively,” the report had pointed out.

But these are at least subsidiary combat roles. Quoting the findings of the report, the official said the BJP government at the Centre is burdening the already overburdened forces with non-combat roles that the armed forces have nothing to do with.

A large manpower of the forces is currently being used in tree plantation and other programmes as part of “Meri Mati Mera Desh” programme.

“Every small activity that we plan has a telling effect on the borders. For example, if we organize a cultural event on the border (company headquarters), that day the boys get to sleep only four hours, that too if the company commander is sincere,” the report pointed out.

It pointed out that at times, during those events, the border remains “unguarded at the mercy of miscreants and anti-national elements”.

Wasteful deployment

Another “wasteful deployment” of scant manpower, the official quoting the report said, is the engagement of jawans in “personal comforts” of high officials.

“Manpower for all the activities as mentioned above comes ultimately from the unit. Taking into consideration the above attachments/ vacancies/ duties/ courses leave etc we now have no doubts in our minds why the strength at the border cannot be kept 500 and why troops are fatigued,” the BSF report deduced.

“Why are the forces needed to promote unrelated activities, such as tree plantation and beekeeping, at a time when they are already overtasked performing subsidiary duties in addition to their core functions?” wondered Tulsi Nair, general secretary of Assam Rifles Ex-servicemen Association.

He said even the top brasses of the security forces readily agree to the ministry’s proposal to implement promotional schemes to please their political bosses for post-retirement benefits.

The forces also use these activities as their own “PR exercise” at the cost of their already overwhelmed manpower, Nair added.