Younis Ahmad Kaloo

As you drive away from the bustling city of Gurugram in Delhi NCR towards the CRPF Academy nestled in the quiet neighbourhood of Kadarpur, a 30x20 feet tri-colour flying at full mast at a height of 112 feet in front of the training and administrative block is the first awe-inspiring thing you come across. It is the tallest tri-colour in a security force’s camp in the country.

CRPF academy at Kadarpur, Haryana

Sprawled over 308 acres, the academy was established in 2002 and began functioning from October 2005 to train directly appointed gazetted officers, who come from different walks of life and later lead 135 men as company commanders.

“We have highly qualified trainee officers reporting for training. Most of them are engineers and post graduates. Our job is to convert these young boys and girls into officers, who can handle the internal security of the country as company commanders. Making them combatants is a very important task, a 24/7 job,” said an officer assigned to brief the team from FORCE at the academy.

In a training period of 52 weeks, the trainees, to begin with, are not directly introduced to the training curriculum but undergo a systematic initial physical conditioning for 36 days. This is to acclimatise their bodies for actual training modules. They are trained to train first.

“Our progression is systematic. We don’t just push them to the training curriculum. For example, we begin with muscle specific training, ” the officer said.

The training curriculum is broadly divided into two categories: indoor and outdoor. The subjects taught under indoor category comprise several distinct modules such as law, management, acts/rules and inquires, provisioning, manuals, IT, leadership, intelligence, personality development, communication