BRO gets eight Shaurya Chakras, two for working in Taliban infested Afghanistan

New Delhi, Mar 25 (ANI): The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) achieves a distinction when the President Pratibha Devisingh Patil would confer on Thursday as many as eight Shaurya Chakras on its men.

This is the first time in more than a decade that the premier road building defence organisation has bagged the most Shaurya Chakras, the country's third highest non-combatant gallantry award, in a year and all of them have been awarded posthumously.

For the first time in its close to five decades long history, BRO's dozer operator Zalim Singh would be conferred with Bar to the Shaurya Chakra, having won the same award twice over. On April 16 last year Zalim Singh was crushed under shooting boulders as he tried to clear a strategic road near village Theing in north Sikkim for a column of tanks.

Two Shaurya Chakras have gone to men of the project Zaranj in Taliban infested Afghanistan. Superintendent Mahendra Pratap Singh and mason C. Govindaswamy died on April 12, 2008 in a suicide bomb attack by Taliban militants on their convoy while it was passing between Delaram and Minar on the Zaranj-Delaram highway, which was handed over on completion by India to Afghanistan just two months ago.

Another two BRO men, Assistant Executive Engineer Santosh Kumar Singh and driver Jaikrit Singh Rawat have won the award in Kashmir, working on the Kishtwar-Sinthan Pass, an alternate axis to link Kashmir Valley. They were martyred in an ambush on June 13, 2008 on their way back from Sinthan Top.

Driver Surinder Pal was martyred in an attack by militants in Meghalaya on May 26 while supervisor M. Sundaram, deployed on the Kailash Mansarovar route, fell in a 60 meters deep valley of Kali river on Indo-Nepal border on 2nd July last year. Dozer Budhu Khan of project Vartak was hit by debris while clearing the Hapoli Sarli-Huri road on Feb. 22, 2008. (ANI)