NEW DELHI: Lieutenant-Governor Taranjit Singh Sandhu on Thursday directed 20% reservation for former Agniveers in Group ‘C’ posts of police constables, firemen, forest guards, jail warders and wildlife guards.

He set a June 30 deadline for all departments to finalise the required processes and implement the necessary amendments to their respective Recruitment Rules.

Sandhu reviewed the strategy for extending reservation benefits to ex-Agniveers (retired short-service Army personnel) across government departments and agencies in Delhi at a meeting with the Chief Secretary, Rajeev Verma, Police Commissioner Satish Golcha and other senior officers.

The L-G has earmarked the quota to optimally harness these youths’ discipline and military training. It will be applicable across key operational departments, specifically covering the recruitment of police constables in Delhi Police, firemen in the Delhi Fire Service, jail warders in the Prison Department, and forest guards and wildlife guards in the Department of Environment, Forest & Wildlife.

Sandhu had earlier suggested that former Agniveers—Army personnel who retire after four years of service—could be inducted to address the manpower shortage in the Delhi Fire Service (DFS) and increase the number of fire stations across the city to improve emergency response times.

The directions were issued at a high-level meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) that the L-G chaired days after the Malviya Nagar hotel fire, in which around two dozen people lost their lives.

This story is reported by Anup Verma