Ensure jawans get to stay with family for 100 days annually: Shah to CAPFs

Union Home Minister Amit Shah has directed the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) like CRPF, BSF and others to undertake a mega manpower planning and ensure that around 7 lakh jawans get to spend at least 100 days with their families in a year, officials said on Thursday.

They said Shah was given a presentation last month about the functioning of the CAPFs in the ministry, following which he directed that the deployment details of the troops of these forces should be "digitised" so that better manpower rationalisation can be done.

The Union Home Ministry has now asked all the chiefs or Directors General (DG) of forces like CRPF, BSF, CISF, ITBP, SSB and Assam Rifles to undertake the exercise and implement a regime where a jawan or a constable gets to stay with his family for about 100 days, the officials said.

This means that the jawans will be posted to their nearest units and they can travel and stay with their families when there are no operational exigencies, a senior official said.

In order to achieve this, he said the force chiefs have been asked to assess and prepare reports of their additional manpower so that the over-all deployment of a CAPF unit is not affected.

When this data is digitised, as compared to the regular paper file format prevalent as of now, it will be easy for the force headquarters to rotate and deploy their troops.

This system will also help in ensuring that a large grievance of personnel regarding their transfer and posting to a place near to their parents or family home will be addressed up to a limit, he said.

The forces have been given a deadline of two months to accomplish the task, the official said.

Former Border Security Force chief K K Sharma has told PTI last year that an average jawan of his force only gets to spend about 2.5 months (about 75 days) in a year with his family and if one has a service of about 30 years, then this figure comes to about five years in the entire job period.