This Sunday, as women script history, NDA readies for a tactical shift

Besides infrastructure changes, the all-male Khadakwasla campus will need sensitisation lessons

Some 17 km southwest of Pune city in Khadakwasla, Maharashtra, lies the National Defence Academy (NDA), the world’s first tri-service military school where cadets aspiring for the army, navy and air force train together. Spread across 28-odd sq km, with hills in the neighbourhood, a pristine lake and an invigorating climate with a mean temperature of 24.3 degrees Celsius, it’s an idyllic campus. Watching over it from atop a hill is the Sinhagad fort, believed to be over 2,000 years old and the site of many battles. For the cadets, hikes and runs from the academy to the fort in full battle gear are part of their three years of regimented routine and rigorous training at the NDA.

This is an academy that prides itself in making soldiers out of boys – or “scholar warriors”, as the NDA says, who pass out armed with a degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and a keen understanding of modern warfare.

Missing from this world, however, are women. But for a handful of academic subject teachers, the NDA has stayed an out-and-out male bastion since Jawaharlal Nehru, as prime minister, laid the foundation stone for it in 1949 (the academy was finally inaugurated on January 16, 1955). This, now, is about to change.

On Sunday, November 14, which coincidentally is Nehru’s birth anniversary, history will be scripted as hundreds of young women write the NDA entrance exam after the Supreme Court told the Centre to open the academy’s gates for them without further ado.

This means the autumn term of 2022 will see NDA’s first women cadets. Confirming this, official sources say that after clearing the written exam and “passing the SSB (Services Selection Board), which is likely scheduled for February-April 2022, the selected cadets would join NDA by June 2022”. The SSB is an intense five-day evaluation process that includes a battery of intelligence, personality, psychological and group tests.

To qualify, cadets also need to meet NDA’s physical fitness and medical criteria – height, weight, eyesight and so on. “The criteria for women cadets regarding physical and other aspects already exist since they have been undergoing it for clearing the SSB of the Officers Training Academy (OTA), Chennai,” say official sources. OTA has been inducting women into the officer cadre in the army since 1992 and so far 1,200 have been commissioned through it.

However, OTA takes in men and women after they graduate, while for NDA entry is right after Class 12 (the age eligibility is between 16.5 years and 19.5 years). Some serving army officers, who ask not to be named, say this should be taken into account when setting physical fitness standards.

Meanwhile, with less than eight months to go before its first women cadets arrive, “NDA is in the process of creating requisite infrastructure and also working on the training curriculum,” say the defence ministry sources. Some reports indicate that this groundbreaking batch will include 20 women cadets, but official sources do not confirm this.

Lessons are being drawn from OTA. Separate living quarters and toilets are a given as is a more robust security apparatus. Apart from these, there will likely be additional support staff, women doctors and possibly also women instructors. Details of additional squadrons, if these are needed, are also being worked out. NDA currently has 18 squadrons, each with some 110-120 cadets.

Anubha Rathore, who passed out of OTA in 1995 and served in the army as captain for five years, says in the Chennai academy, the training duration and regime are the same and there is no segregation of men and women. NDA is also unlikely to see gender-based segregation. The Air Force Academy at Dundigal (Telangana) and the Indian Naval Academy at Ezhimala (Kerala), too, have been training women for years.

At NDA, however, the training is known to be more exacting. Besides survival, weapons, telephony, camouflage, combat and such training, the academy has three camps that push the human body to limits it did not know it was capable of enduring. Of these, the five-day Camp Rover, held at the end of the fourth term (second year), is said to be among the world’s toughest in this age group.

“It’s five sleepless days and night spent on the move, carrying some 15 kg of load plus rifles – running, hiding, surviving, escaping (officers who act as the enemy and punish you if you’re caught), and carrying out operations in the jungles, hills and canals without navigation equipment, with only the stars to guide you,” recalls a serving colonel who passed out of the academy in 1999.

These training standards will not be changed for women, said Chief of Army Staff General M M Naravane at the NDA passing out parade (POP) on October 29. Naravane is an NDA alumnus as are the current navy and air force chiefs. So is India’s first and current Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat. Serving and retired women officers spoken to agree that there should not be double standards of any kind in the forces. “As long as both genders are treated equally and fairly, it will be fine for both sides,” says Rathore.

Ready for change: But for a handful of academic subject teachers, the National Defence Academy has stayed an out-and-out male bastion | Photo: Reuters

This will require the army, particularly, to level the playing field. In December 2018, at another POP at NDA, Rawat, then army chief, had said the force wasn’t yet ready to deploy women in combat roles. And they are still not allowed to serve in the fighting forces: the infantry and armoured corps. Will their entry into the NDA change this? That’s for the army to answer.

‘Sensitise NDA & the army’

“She will run faster, shoot better, and draw up sharper strategies. That’s not the issue. Nor is building additional infrastructure,” says Danvir Singh, former commanding officer of 9 Sikh LI and associate editor, Indian Defence Review, of women cadets.

“There is a deeper aspect to be worked on: the mindset. It is highly recommended that in these months before women are inducted into the NDA, gender sensitisation exercises are carried out in the academy.” The NDA, he adds, “has been frozen in time. Picture a teenage male, barely 16 or 17, training for three years in this insulated environment under instructors who have themselves, largely, emerged from this environment, and then heading to another all-male academy and then to an all-male regiment.”

Official sources say, “Sensitisation of existing cadets and staff will be the ongoing process. Also, it’s important to note that most of the boy cadets of NDA come from a co-education system.”

Sainik Schools, the all-male cradle from which many young boys come to the defence academies, have also now opened to girls. Change is in the air and officers say this will not only make the NDA more contemporary and inclusive, like the OTA and the air force and naval academies, it will also have a positive impact on the army. “It will help especially in the army’s dealings in counterinsurgency areas where circumstances are such that it has to engage closely with the civilian population,” says Danvir Singh, whose book Kashmir’s Death Trap: Tales of Perfidy and Valour recalls “life in Kashmir, a state under perpetual conflict”.

An infantry officer who served in the insurgency-prone areas of Manipur some years ago agrees. “The presence, competence and understanding of women officers will help in such operational environments, particular when soldiers have to conduct search operations in people’s homes that have women and children,” he says.