Home ministry looks to form 29-battalion Indo-Myanmar border force

According to the proposal, 25 battalions of Assam Rifles will be paired with 4 battalions from ITBP to form the new force. The ITBP will be in charge.

Updated on: Jan 18, 2018, 09:18:34 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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The ministry of home affairs is considering the creation of a 29-battalion India-Myanmar Border Force from the corps of the Assam Rifles and the Indo-Tibetan Border Force to patrol India’s 1,643-km long mountainous border with Myanmar to curtail drugs and arms smuggling and also crimp the activities of Manipuri and Naga insurgents who take advantage of the porous border.

A woman carries her laundry past washing hanging up to dry on the India-Myanmar border fencing at Moreh, some 120 kms from Manipur capital Imphal. (AFP File Photo)

The new force will patrol right up to the border. Currently, the 46-battalion strong Assam Rifles safeguards this border but patrols up to 500 meters from the so-called zero line, which leaves the border partly porous.

According to the proposal, seen by the Hindustan Times, 25 battalions of Assam Rifles will be paired with 4 battalions from ITBP to form the new force. The ITBP will be in charge.

This will ensure that ITBP not only patrols the 3,488-km Line of Actual Control with China but also the border with Myanmar. “The proposal will be put up before the Union Cabinet after due diligence and obtaining the views of the forces guarding the Indian borders,” said a senior Home Ministry official, who asked not to be identified.

The plan could run afoul of inter-security forces bickering, though.

Read | Cabinet approves Indo-Myanmar agreement on land border crossing

The ITBP is keen to man the border with Mynamar, but the Indian Army isn’t too keen on the plan, especially given its umbilical connection with Assam Rifles. The latter is a para-military force headed by a serving Indian Army officer of the rank of Lieutenant General, and a large number of its personnel, including officers, come from the military.

The Indian Army is of the opinion that ITBP should give up patrolling on the LAC and concentrate only on the Myanmar border.

The other option that Army has offered is that the ITBP give up its patrolling in Eastern Ladakh sector in favour of military if it wants control of the Myanmar border.

The government is unlikely to be happy with either plan. It is keen on a para-military force as the first line of defence on the LAC and there is no question of entire ITBP being moved to the Myanmar border as the force was trained for high altitude patrolling and warfare.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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