Soldiers’ training to be revamped to make them more resilient

NEW DELHI, Jan 1: Efforts are afoot to revamp training of army personnel to make them more resilient to extremely high physical and mental stress.
DRDO has started to work on a project to increase mental and physical abilities of a soldier and increase his resilience to withstand high level of stress, Chief Controller, Life Science, Dr W Selvamurthy told PTI here.
“We are working on a programme for comprehensive resilience building for the soldiers, which will make him physically, mentally and psychologically stronger,” he said.
Capital-based Defence Institute of Psychological Research (DIPR) has been entrusted with the project, which will be completed in two years’ time.
“The programme will increase the resilience of soldiers and improve their combat efficiency even in Counter Insurgency Operations and other stressful environments,” Dr Selvamurthy said.
While the project will come up with new training methods for soldiers and ways to prepare them for stressful environments, it will also focus on making them psychologically tougher.
“The main focus will be on the training component under which we are going to train individuals who can tolerate high levels of stress so their tolerance level will go up and operational efficiency will also go up and stress level will come down,” he said.
The programme will focus on the Gentlemen Cadets joining the National Defence Academy (NDA), Indian Military Academy (IMA) and Officer’s Training Academy (OTA).
“The candidates will be selected during their training period in respective academies and then they will be put through some extra trainings to make them more resilient. The training will include several aspects of stress which are different from a conventional war situation,” he said.
While the initial focus will be on young officers, the project will also include jawans at a later stage.
Meanwhile, defence scientists are also devising ways to make the troops withstand psychological stress with the help of new shelters to reduce the impact of harsh climate on their health.
Termed as ‘Project Dhruv’, the exercise is aimed at providing troops with “enriched environment” at isolated location.
“Project Dhruv is aimed at environment enrichment within the shelter. This is one of the components for removing his stress in such isolated and forward areas,” Dr Selvamurthy said. (PTI)

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