Tripura State Rifles Jawans To Be Deployed In Odisha On Election Duty

Agartala: Jawans of the Tripura State Rifles (TSR), an elite counter-insurgency force, are set to proceed to Odisha and Himachal Pradesh for deployment on election duty.

A top Tripura Police official was quoted by news agency IANS as saying that 20 companies (1,600 personnel) of the TSR had been sent to Maharashtra and Bihar, where parliamentary elections are now underway since the first phase of voting on April 19.

The TSR jawans would now go to Himachal Pradesh and Odisha where simultaneous polling would be held for 147-member Assembly and in 21 Lok Sabha seats in four phases between May 13 and June 1, the agency said.

Besides providing security during the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, the TSR’s India Reserve (IR) battalions, which can be deployed anywhere in the country as per the Ministry of Home Affairs’s requirements, have done duty in almost all states during the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

Two TSR battalions, comprising around 2,000 personnel, have been posted in the national capital under the Delhi Police’s authority since 2019 and in South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL) in Chhattisgarh since 2022, while one battalion provides security to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation’s drilling sites in Tripura.