No place for rioters in Agnipath: Centre
The Centre on Sunday doubled down on the contentious Agnipath scheme and said youth aspiring to become Agniveers should give an undertaking that they never took part in any form of violence.
With protests still continuing in several parts of the country, senior officials of the Army, Navy and Air Force made public the schedules for implementing the scheme, brushing aside demands for its withdrawal.
Their remarks came after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had another round of meeting with the three service chiefs.
Lt Gen Anil Puri, additional secretary at the Department of Military Affairs in the Ministry of Defence, told journalists that any candidate aspiring to become an Agniveer would have to state in the enrolment form that he/she had never taken part in any violent protest.
“There is no place for arson, vandalism or indiscipline in the armed forces. If there is any FIR against any candidate, she or he cannot be an Agniveer,” Lt Gen Puri said, adding that aspiring soldiers would have to go through a police verification process.
He said the intake of Agniveers would go up from the initial 46,000 to 1,25,000 in near future.
The Army will issue a draft notification for recruitment through Agnipath on Monday, followed by subsequent notifications issued by various recruitment units from July 1 next.
The recruitment rallies will take take place across the country in August, September and October, and first batch of 25,000 Agniveers would join the training programme in the first and second week of December, Lt Gen C Bansi Ponnappa, adjutant general of the Indian Army, said.
The Indian Navy will come out with a broad recruitment guideline by June 25. The first batch of recruits – both men and women – will join the training programme by November 21, Vice Admiral Dinesh Tripathi, the chief of personnel of the Indian Navy, said.
The IAF will start the registration process on June 24 and the process for online examination for phase one of the recruitment will begin on July 24. “We are planning to start the training for the first batch of recruits by December 30,” Air Marshall S K Jha, air officer-in-charge (personnel), said.
“We had lengthy discussions on how to make our forces young. We studied foreign forces too. We want young people. Youths are risk takers, they have passion. In them, ‘josh’ (enthusiasm) and ‘hosh’ (experience) are in equal proportions,” Lt General Puri said.
Regarding the sops, Lt Gen Puri said they had been planned well before the announcement of the ‘Agnipath’ and not were not a reaction to the protests.