District Reserve Guard (DRG)

The District Reserve Guard (DRG) is a state-level armed police formation in India, raised district by district to operate as a specialised counter-insurgency and internal security force. Unlike the centralised paramilitary forces under the Union government — such as the CRPF or the Indo-Tibetan Border Police — DRGs are recruited, trained, and deployed by individual state governments, which gives them a distinctly local character. Each district unit is typically officered by personnel from the regular state police cadre and is intended to combine the intimate knowledge of local terrain, language, and tribal networks possessed by indigenous recruits with the disciplined organisation of a paramilitary-style formation. The most prominent — and most written-about — iteration is the Chhattisgarh DRG, which has become synonymous with the broader fight against Maoist insurgency in central India. ## Origins and Historical Background The DRG concept was formalised under Section 13 of the Police Act of 1861, read with provisions in the Indian Police Act and the state police manuals, which empower state governments to raise reserve armed police forces over and above the district armed reserve. Chhattisgarh, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in November 2000, inherited its DRG structure and significantly expanded it from the early 2000s as the state became one of the principal theatres of Left-Wing Extremism (LWE). The rationale was pragmatic: the initial wave of central forces, while well-trained, often lacked local intelligence networks and found it difficult to distinguish villagers from insurgents in the dense, forested Abujhmad and Bastar regions. The DRG was conceived as a hybrid force — local boys who knew every forest path, commanded by regular police officers, and equipped for sustained jungle warfare. ## How It Works and Operational Role A typical DRG company is raised at the district level, sanctioned on the basis of the threat assessment and the area of operations. Recruits are usually drawn from the local Scheduled Tribe population of the district in which the unit is raised, an explicit design choice to ensure linguistic and cultural familiarity with the theatre. Training takes place at state police facilities and includes counter-insurgency tactics, jungle warfare, intelligence gathering, and the use of IED-detection drills — the latter acquiring sharp importance after a series of devastating improvised explosive device attacks on security convoys in Bastar from 2010 onwards. Operationally, DRG units conduct area domination patrols, ambushes along known Maoist transit routes, and joint operations with the CRPF's Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA). They also function as a critical intelligence bridge: their local recruits often pass through villages without triggering the suspicion that uniformed central forces attract. Critics, however, have pointed to recurring allegations of human rights abuses involving DRG personnel in custody-related cases, which have made the force controversial in rights-focused reporting on central India. ## Significance in India's Counter-LWE Architecture The DRG occupies a unique middle ground in India's internal security architecture. The central paramilitary forces bring numbers and equipment; the state police bring jurisdictional authority; the DRG attempts to merge the two, particularly in districts where the Maoist insurgency has historically taken deepest root — Bijapur, Sukma, Dantewada, Narayanpur, and Kondagaon in Chhattisgarh, and parallel districts in Jharkhand and Odisha. Its model has been studied closely: the Jharkhand Tiger Force and the Odisha Special Operation Group have drawn operational lessons from Chhattisgarh's experience. Following the 2024 incidents — including the IED blast in Bijapur district that killed four DRG personnel — the force has remained a central instrument of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs' LWE strategy, even as policy attention has gradually shifted towards the "clear, hold, build" approach that pairs security operations with development expenditure in surrendered-extremist rehabilitation and road-infrastructure projects. ## Current Status The Chhattisgarh DRG currently comprises several thousand personnel distributed across districts of the Bastar and Surguja divisions, with newer units raised in Rajnandgaon and other bordering areas. Casualty figures remain a recurring feature of its operational record: the force has lost personnel in dozens of ambushes and IED incidents since 2010, with notable attacks at Sarkeguda (2012), Burkapal (2017), and the Bijapur blasts of 2023 and 2024. Despite these losses, state security planners continue to view the DRG as indispensable, because no alternative formation has yet replicated