For the first time, Indian Navy Chief Admiral R Hari Kumar will visit Ladakh in the first week of July to urge youth from the Union Territory to join the maritime force.

“The outreach mission is primarily because, with the Agniveer scheme that we have started, the vision of the Prime Minister that we should have at least one Agniveer from every village,” the Navy Chief said in an interview with ANI.

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The Agniveer Scheme was announced in June 2022 for recruitment in the armed forces. This scheme is just for recruiting soldiers and not officers in the forces. The soldiers recruited under this Agneepath scheme will be known as Agniveer.

In fact, the training of the first batch of Agniveers under the Navy began in November 2022.
“When we did a study, we found that currently, we have representation from about 656 districts out of all the districts of India, which is about 85 per cent, we are trying to make it 100 per cent in the coming years,” he added.

The Admiral asserted that the Navy is trying to reach out and found out that the northeast particularly, and Ladakh, are the areas from where there are very few people in the service in the Navy.

“In the month of December, we had gone to Nagaland. We are planning to go to Manipur and the other states also subsequently. And we had sent an expedition of women, the Car rally, which was conducted in Rajasthan, the western part of the country. We did a coastal Car rally starting from Kolkata to Lakkpat in Gujarat, which is done in the month of April,” he said.

He further stated that the Navy is doing this primarily to make the youth aware of this institution and therefore they should be encouraged to join the Navy.

“We are now doing the same thing in a similar thing in effort in Ladakh. So we have sent a bike rally, a car rally. So what they do is they go interact with the schools, interact with the youth as well as the local populace. For example, in the entire Navy, we have only seven sailors and one officer from Ladakh, which I feel is very less. So our effort is to interact with them and try and have more people to be aware of it,” he said.