The Union Home Ministry has issued a set of new directives to paramilitary forces in accordance with Supreme Court guidelines on atrocities against women in workplaces. As many as 9,000 personnel are women in paramilitary forces and the recent MHA guidelines insist the forces to provide regular monthly updates on this regard.
The Ministry has asked three border guarding forces — BSF, ITBP and SSB, and three others CRPF, CISF and NSG to inform it on
monthly basis about these incidents in a new eight-point format.
The Ministry has also asked that it should be informed about occurrence of such instances right from the company (100 personnel), battalion (1,000 personnel), sector (5,000 about personnel) and frontier (more than 5,000 personnel) level.
“All the paramilitary forces now have women combatants and their numbers are increasing every day. In order to streamline the process of complaints with regard to sexual harassment cases, the Home Ministry issued the new directions sometime back,” a senior official said.
The present strength of women in ‘khaki’ is close to 9,000 while female employees constitute few more thousands in their administrative setup of these forces deployed not only for border security tasks but also for rendering internal security duties.
The internal setup, for probing cases of sexual harassment, in these forces has a woman officer heading the inquiry committee under the provisions of Vishakha guidelines ordered by the Supreme Court.