CRPF goes a year without losing personnel in operations for first time in 47 years

New Delhi: For the first time in nearly five decades, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has completed 12 consecutive months without an operational fatality - a significant achievement for a force deployed in anti-Maoist and counterinsurgency operations that has suffered some of the deadliest casualties.

"This has happened after 47 years," CRPF director general GP Singh said, noting that the last operational fatality was reported on October 30, 2025. "It's especially significant since this has happened while we continue to be deployed and engage intensely in all the major operational theatres, achieving significant breakthrough results," he said in a post on X. The last such period ended in January 1979.

Singh attributed the milestone to "latest and contemporary hardware, better training and strategic planning along with focus on post-incident response, including high-speed evacuation of injured personnel to secondary and tertiary medical facilities."


A top bureaucrat once recalled how attacks on CRPF in the Left-wing extremism (LWE) theatre are remembered in the names of director generals at the time. From the 2010 Dantewada attack, in which 76 CRPF personnel were killed, to the 2025 Bijapur attack, in which eight of the nine CRPF personnel were killed, every attack was marked to the head of the force.

CRPF is the largest central armed police force, with over 300,000 personnel. Nearly 50,000 CRPF personnel were deployed in LWE-affected areas at the peak of Maoist activity, including around 40,000 in Chhattisgarh's Bastar region, its nerve centre.

The force also handles security in Jammu and Kashmir and reported one of its largest casualties in February 2019 when a vehicle-bound improvised explosive device driven by a suicide bomber killed 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama district. JeM militants carried out a fidayeen attack on a CRPF camp at Letpora in Pampore early morning on December 31, 2017, killing five CRPF personnel while two of the militants were later shot dead in the operation. In 2016, eight CRPF troopers were killed and 20 others injured when militants attacked their convoy near Pampore on Srinagar-Jammu National Highway.

October 21 was named as Police Commemoration Day after 10 CRPF personnel were martyred during patrol duty near India-China border in an ambush by Chinese troops on that day in 1959.

The period without operational fatalities since October 30, 2025, coincides with the home ministry setting a deadline of March 31, 2026, to end the Maoist menace. The number of Maoist-affected districts came down to just 11 in 2025 from 126 in 2014.

The home ministry in April this year revised the nomenclature for LWE-affected districts covered under the security-related expenditure scheme. At present, there are no districts officially classified as LWE-affected, and hence the SRE framework includes only two categories - districts of concern and legacy and thrust districts, according to officials.

In 2025-26, Chhattisgarh - the worst LWE-affected state - reported over 2,700 surrenders while MHA stated that only three districts remain most affected by Maoism in 2025, compared to 36 in 2014. The number of fortified police stations in the country has increased from 66 in 2014 to 586 over the last 10 years. Police stations reporting Naxal incidents have dropped sharply from 330 across 76 districts in 2013 to just 52 in 22 districts by June 2025.