West Bengal police personnel will soon go to the Jungle Warfare College at Chhattisgarh to learn guerilla warfare.

Brigadier Basant Kumar Ponwar, director of the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College at Kanker in Chhattishgarh, was in the city last week.

“The new session begins in July and I am waiting for a formal proposal from West Bengal. I had initially suggested that we start with a batch of 36 personnel but the Bengal police is keen to send 100 personnel,” the brigadier said.

Ponwar, after superannuation from the Army was invited by the Chhattishgarh government to open a school modeled on the Army’s School of Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare where he was the commandant in his last posting. “The school, which has been functioning from August 2005, has imparted training to at least 3,000 police personnel of various ranks from Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh,” he said.

“We are still finalising the number of personnel that are to be sent for training. Talks are on,” said Inspector General, law and order, Raj Kanojia.

Keeping in view the Maoist disturbances in certain districts of the state, the West Bengal Police has already tied up with the army to train its personnel in counter insurgency warfare.

“The training with the army was started last year and already 1,500 personnel have been trained. They have been placed in north Bengal and Panagarh,” said Kanojia.

“The entire training is done in dense forests where the students are not only taught to handle sophisticated weapons, but at the same time allowed to go through adverse situations so that they have real-life experience,” Ponwar said.