to the CRPF headquarters in New Delhi highlighting the poor condition of its counter-terror training apparatus.

The last of these letters was sent by CRPF IG Rajnish Rai on November 22, 2018, less than two months before the Pulwama terror attack on February 14 this year when 40 CRPF men lost their lives.

Rai was in charge of the CRPF’s 175-acre CIAT school in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor, one of the three such schools allotted to the force by the Union Home Ministry, which envisaged 21 such facilities in 2007 for various forces.

A 1992-batch IPS officer of the Gujarat cadre, Rai was serving as CRPF IG (Northeast Sector) till June 2017, when he was asked to take charge of the CIAT school in Chittoor. The transfer came three months after hehad called for a probe into what he alleged was a fake encounter — by a joint team of Army, CRPF, SSB and police — in Assam’s Chirang on March 30.

Last December, Rai was suspended by the Home Ministry for “unauthorised handing over of charge” after he quit the service citing an application for voluntary retirement in August, which had been rejected. In January, the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) stayed the Centre’s action; Rai has since moved the Gujarat High Court.

In his letters, Rai pointed out that the CRPF schools only provide theatre-specific, short-term pre-induction (PI) training to personnel headed for Kashmir, the Northeast or LWE areas.

Rai was not available for comment. But a senior CRPF officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that “some kind of training”