25 August,2009 08:42 AM IST | | Anshuman G Dutta
The Academy wants to build a museum for its gallantary award winners but has no record of them
It's an identity crisis of another dimension.
The country's premier army training institution wants to honour its martyrs and decorated soldiers but it doesn't know who they are.
The National Defence Academy (NDA) has no record of its graduates who won various gallantry awards in the three armed forces. The NDA has come up with a proposal to raise a museum to honour its brave graduates but there are no records to help it find them.
A senior Defence Ministry official while discussing the issue said that there are 60,000 gallantry medal winners in the Indian army and it is very difficult to indentify which among them passed out from the NDA. The Academy being a tri-service intuition trains cadets for all the armed forces which are sent to their respective academies after completion of their three year long tenure.u00a0u00a0
"After passing out from the NDA the cadets go to their different training academies for further training. They are assigned new service number in their new academies, which is not related to the service number provided by the NDA. Now, the job is finding the officers who won gallantry awards and passed out from NDA has become a tricky job for us," said the officer.
The list of gallantry medal winners in the armed forces is maintained by the Adjutant General's branch in the Indian army. But in this case the AG branch too could not be of any help to the NDA.
Meanwhile, the NDA is planning to write to all the different branches of the armed forces to get the details of officers who served with them and won gallantry awards.
The gallantry awards are broadly divided into two categories wartime gallantry medals and peace time gallantry awards. The wartime gallantry awards include Param Vir Chakra the highest gallantry medal- followed by Mahavir Chakra and Vir Chakra. The peacetime gallantry awards include Ashok Chakra, Shaurya Chakra and Kirti Chakra. Besides these there are awards like Sena Medal, Vayu Sena Medal and Nau Sena Medal awarded by respective services.u00a0
Though the list of the PVC, MVC and VrC awardees are easily available along with their background but the NDA is finding it real hard to dig out the list of other gallantry awardees. The museum, which is being planned in the academy, will showcase the history and heroism of the NDA graduates.
