Fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla,” reads the motto of the elite Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) located in Kanker (Chhattisgarh), a hotbed of left-wing Maoist/ Naxalite militancy.

And, increasingly, this fight is being fought on four legs, of the canine kind.

In June 2008, the CTJWC was informed that Naxalites had destroyed a power tower and implanted improvised explosive devices along the Barsur-Dantewada road in southern Bastar. A bomb disposal team rushed to the spot and Teja quickly sniffed out the IEDs as well as a booby trap, which were promptly defused.

Barely four months later, a locally-made crude bomb blew up inside the Bilaspur High Court. Teja's colleague Lily has been on duty at the court ever since, on the watch for suspicious devices, much to the amused delight of the judges and lawyers.

Teja and Lily, as also Kareena, Sally and several other four-legged members of CTJWC are no different from the scores of mongrels found in the lanes and by-lanes of cities, towns and villages, often rummaging in garbage bins for survival – except that these mongrels were picked up from the streets in July 2007 and trained in sniffer duties by the CTJWC, which imparts “guerrilla warfare training” to police personnel from different States. The mongrels successfully cleared the grading tests conducted by a board of officers and graduated along with two Labradors in April 2008.

Besides participating in tasks such as clearing roads, road inauguration parties and VIP duty, they have also performed in complete harmony with their Labrador and Alsatian counterparts at Republic Day and Independence Day parades. They have uncomplainingly accompanied long-range patrols in jungle terrain spread over 2-3 days.

The credit for transforming these much discredited “strays”, as they are commonly dubbed, into brave custodians of the law goes to CTJWC Director Basant Kumar Ponwar, who is a retired army brigadier, veteran counter-insurgency expert and avid dog lover rolled into one.

According to Ponwar, sniffer dogs are the most reliable means to detect IEDs on unmetalled roads and tracks in remote jungle terrain. Nearly 44 per cent of Chhattisgarh is under forest cover and battling Naxal violence, which has claimed the lives of 662 security personnel, mainly due to IED blasts, during the last five years.

Asserting that mongrels are in no way inferior to their pedigreed counterparts, Ponwar began by training four of them for sniffer duties after seeking the permission of the Chhattisgarh government.

“All the four mongrels responded very well to the training in the first three months and successfully completed all obedience tests; and in the next six months, they learnt the tricks of obstacle crossing and underwent IED detection training. The dogs took the curriculum very well, albeit with a little more personalised effort by the handlers,” says Ponwar. Today, eight of his trained mongrels are deployed in Bastar, while three went on to participate in this year's Republic Day Parade in Raipur.

The pedigree dogs and mongrels share the same diet and training schedule, but the so-called country dogs rarely require vet visits and can work long hours and walk 30-40 km without displaying any signs of tiredness or exhaustion, says Ponwar. They also adjust well to the jungle terrain in hot and humid weather, as also under severe cold conditions or during heavy rains, he adds.

While the Labrador and Alsatian dogs sometimes require veterinary care, the mongrels rarely ever fall sick.

The mongrels show extreme resilience, which can prove handy in assisting security forces countrywide, says the Ati Vishist Seva Medal recipient.

He is now training Marwari horses from Udaipur and Jaipur to accompany the commandos on their patrols through rough terrain, especially on the outskirts of Kanker. The horses too have participated in Republic Day and Independence Day parades as well as the 60-km and 80-km endurance races in Jodhpur. A polo enthusiast who once rode the renowned Zanskari ponies on the high slopes of Leh, Ponwar says, “Horses serve their masters until they drop dead, and the thoroughbreds adapt just as well as their tough, mixed breed counterparts.”

With counter-insurgency operations peaking in the country and the existing force of Labradors, Dobermans and German Shepherds working to the point of exhaustion, it is time to rope in more numbers of the hardy and unsung mongrel, he says.

Sniffer dogs, irrespective of breed, receive a daily diet of 500 gm of wheat-based or 400 gm of rice-based meal; 750 ml of milk; 400 gm of mutton; two calcium tablets; two yeast tablets; 5 gm each of turmeric and salt.

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