CRPF Completes First Fatality-Free Operational Year in 47 Years as Maoist Insurgency Ends and the Force Reinvents Itself

The Central Reserve Police Force has done something it had not managed since the late 1970s. It completed 12 months without losing a single personnel in an operational incident anywhere in the country, and no operational fatality has occurred since October 30, 2025. Director General GP Singh announced the milestone on X, crediting modern equipment, better training and strategic planning. The force achieved this while remaining deployed across the country’s major security theatres.

The scale of the change shows in the numbers from earlier years. In 2024, 12 CRPF personnel died in operations across Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur. In 2025, eight of the nine who died were killed in action in Maoist-affected areas of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. The last two operational deaths came in October 2025 in West Singhbhum, Jharkhand. The streak began just months before a larger milestone. India was declared free of Left-Wing Extremism on March 31, 2026, and the CRPF spearheaded the anti-Naxal operations until then. ThePrint’s editorial board argues that the record is no accident. It reflects the force’s evolution, modernisation, better leadership and political focus on violent movements.

From a colonial police unit to India’s largest paramilitary force

The CRPF began in 1939 as the Crown Representative’s Police, raised at Neemuch to support princely states during the final years of British rule. It became the Central Reserve Police Force by an Act of Parliament in 1949, shortly after Independence, and was tasked with assisting states in maintaining law and order. Its first major test of national defence came early. Every October 21, the force marks Commemoration Day for ten CRPF personnel ambushed and killed by Chinese forces in Ladakh in 1959, a date later adopted to honour police martyrs across India.

The force kept expanding its mandate as India’s threats changed. It policed elections and communal disturbances in its early decades, and in 1992 it raised the Rapid Action Force, trained for riot control and crowd management. In Punjab and then Jammu and Kashmir it took on militancy directly. The CRPF became a main target of militant attacks after replacing the BSF in most parts of the Kashmir valley in the 1990s. It also guarded Parliament and other high-security installations during attacks in the early 2000s.

The Maoist fight and the lessons of loss

The campaign against Naxalism tested the force hardest and changed it the most. Losses such as the 2010 Dantewada ambush, which killed 76 personnel, exposed gaps in jungle training, intelligence and equipment. The response was the CoBRA battalions, raised from 2008 as specialist jungle-warfare units, along with better surveillance, forward camps that pushed security into remote Bastar and Jharkhand, and tighter coordination with state police. The February 2019 Pulwama attack, which killed 40 personnel in a convoy, prompted further changes in how convoys move and how threats are assessed. These sacrifices led to the capabilities now credited for the fatality-free year.

What comes next

The force is already shifting its weight. Several CRPF battalions have been moved from Bastar to the northeastern state of Manipur, where three personnel were recently injured in Imphal after militants targeted them with a bomb. The mission has changed from clearing jungle strongholds to election security, counter-terrorism in Kashmir, disaster response and the volatile Northeast. One challenge persists inside the ranks. Personnel suicides remain a concern for a force that has reduced combat deaths to zero. Meeting that challenge with the same seriousness as the insurgency would let the milestone mean more than a single year’s record.