A slow-burning crisis is consuming India’s central armed police forces (CAPFs) from within. Not a crisis of courage – the jawans and officers of the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) have never lacked that.
The crisis is structural, bureaucratic, and deeply corrosive: a system of human resource mismanagement so skewed in its design and so indifferent in its execution that it is eroding morale, stifling careers, and, most dangerously, degrading the combat effectiveness of forces entrusted with guarding India’s frontiers and internal security.
The trigger for the current outrage among CAPF veterans and serving personnel is the government’s stated intent to deny the forces what the Supreme Court has upheld as their constitutional right: organized “Group A” service (OGAS) and non-functional financial upgradation (NFFU). Following the court’s landmark judgment of May 23, 2025, anger and anxiety have swept through the CAPF community – not merely as personal grievance, but as genuine alarm over what this denial means for national security.
Veterans and their associations have mounted an energetic campaign on social media, pressing the government and the ministry of home affairs to honour the Supreme Court’s directive. Yet they find themselves sidelined in a bureaucratic ecosystem that has historically privileged the powerful over the professional. What makes this all the more troubling is that the mainstream electronic and print media – ordinarily so exercised by security matters – has maintained a conspicuous silence on the issue. The reasons for that silence remain, as they say, best known to themselves.
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