Indian Army Creates History – Indian Women Can Now Directly Enrol As Soldiers!

Taking a quantum leap in the country’s development, the Indian Army today opened its doors for recruitment of women as soldiers in the Indian military police.

Taking a quantum leap in the country’s development, the Indian Army today opened its doors for recruitment of women as soldiers in the Indian military police.

In the history of the nation’s armed forces, the Army today for the first time issued an advertisement for recruiting women into the Military Police. Till now women were recruited only as officers in the Army. At the beginning of this year, the Defence Minister, Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman, had announced her decision to induct women as Jawans (soldiers) in the Corps of Military Police in the Indian Army.

The window for the application process for recruitment of “soldier general duty (Women Military Police)” opened today (April 25, 2019) and will be closed on June 8, 2019. The process of registration is also available online. This implies that women will now be inducted into the force in the Personnel Below Officer Rank (PBOR) category. The recruitment of women will be done in a phased manner to form 20 percent of the Corps of Military Police.

The Corps of Military Police is responsible for preserving good order and discipline and to prevent breaches of the same. Their role will revolve around probing crime cases for providing on-field assistance in Army operations. The responsibilities under PBOR category primarily include investigation of cases pertaining to rape, molestation, theft, evacuation assistance, assisting in any other manner during cross-border hostilities, and crowd control of refugees including men and women. It also includes ceremonial and policing duties besides running Prisoner of War camps in conflict situations.

Describing it as a ‘gift’ to the country’s ‘brave daughters’, the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech last year had announced that women officers recruited into the armed forces under the Short Service Commission will have the option of taking up Permanent Commission. The Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, had expressed concerns that appropriate facilities will have to be created for women to be inducted in combat roles and the process for doing that was actively underway.

As per current statistics, women comprise a low percentage of the country’s armed forces-The Army (3.80%), the Air Force (13.09%), the Navy (6.00%). They mostly work in medical, legal, signals, and engineering roles of the Army. The decision to recruit women as soldiers is a groundbreaking step towards women’s empowerment and improving their representation in the country’s armed forces. It also acknowledges the fact that women have an equal role to play in keeping the nation’s borders safe through combat roles as well as peacekeeping missions.

Image source: YouTube

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Kanupriya Kumar

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