‘My men need to be protected’

NEW DELHI: Jyoti Kumar Sinha, the director general of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), is a worried man.

“When my soldier goes into an area, for operation he knows it is definitely mined and he knows he is certainly going to be fired up on. What does he want in such a situation to feel confident?” asks the chief of the paramilitary force that has most of its men deployed in Kashmir, northeast and in naxal-infested areas.

The question keeps returning as I accompany Sinha and his senior officials for almost an hour checking out armoured vehicles, personal protection suits, and systems to detect explosives on display from around the world in Pragti Maidan at the Defexpo 2006.

“What my men want are personal protection, mine-proof vehicles and systems to detect explosives,” Sinha lists the priorities. “The important thing,” Sinha says, is “not just the level of protection but also the level of detection.”

The deliberate and intense search for mine-proof vehicles, modern bullet-proof jackets and detection systems by Sinha and his senior officials is reflective of the larger concerns of the Indian security establishment.

Insurgents across the country have taken to remote controlled explosions targeted at security agencies in a major way. Of the 74 CRPF personnel who died on duty last year, 48 were victims of IEDs.

The CRPF actually woke up to the challenge last year on September 3, 2005. Twenty-two CPRF jawans leaving for home on leave died in a massive blast in Chattisgarh.

A mine proof vehicle, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation in which they were crowded into, passed over some 50 kilograms of explosives including RDX. In the impact of the explosion, the vehicle flew up some 20 feet and over 100 feet forward.

Almost all the soldiers died of head, spinal and neck injuries. “No shell had pierced the vehicle,” says Sinha of the ability of the DRDO vehicle.

Today, the CRPF has two such vehicles and eight more are in the pipeline from DRDO. But that is insufficient to meet the mammoth challenge "We need at least 200 mine-proof vehicles. The problem is the availability of them," says Sinha, as he takes a close look at the Humvees, world's most popular mine-proof vehicle.

The base price for a Humvee is Rs 30 lakhs, which could shoot up by several more lakhs with additional accessories, and there are bigger mine-proof vehicles that could cost up to a couple of crores.

A feet away, Sinha takes a deeper look at the RG-31 armoured personnel vehicle manufactured by a South African arm of the British defence major BAE Systems. It was the same company which supplied Casspir, the APVs that Indian security forces are using in Kashmir.

Mohan Guruswamy, one of India's most lucid writers on strategic issues, says vehicles like Casspir are not real answers to the growing challenges. Most of the mine-proof vehicles in the world can only take explosions from up to 12 kilograms of sophisticated explosives.

"It is a never ending competition, as the companies increase the capacity of the armour, the militants increase the amount of explosives in each IED.”