Raised at Lucknow on 24 May 2013 and affiliated to the 11th Gorkha Rifles, the Sikkim Scouts recruit mainly from Sikkim for high-altitude border duty.
The log bridge in North Sikkim
At about 11 on the morning of 22 May 2025, a route-clearing patrol of the Sikkim Scouts was crossing a makeshift log bridge in North Sikkim when Agniveer Stephan Subba lost his balance and fell into a fast mountain stream. The patrol leader, Lieutenant Shashank Tiwari, went in after him. Naik Pukar Katel followed. Between them they got Subba out. The current then carried Tiwari away, and his body was recovered about 800 metres downstream.
Tiwari was 23 and had been commissioned on 14 December 2024, a little over five months earlier. He was awarded the Kirti Chakra posthumously.
Approved in December 2012
The regiment that Tiwari served with was then only twelve years old. The Cabinet Committee on Security approved a battalion of Sikkim Scouts on 6 December 2012, following a request from the state's Chief Minister, Pawan Kumar Chamling. Sikkim's Rajya Sainik Board credited him with pressing the central government on the matter since 2005.
The Tribune reported the terms at the time. Raising the battalion would cost about Rs 32.50 crore, with a recurring cost of Rs 34.45 crore a year, and it was expected to be ready within 30 months. Its job was to guard the high passes and parts of northeastern Sikkim and to watch infiltration routes. The planned strength was:
- 28 officers
- 44 junior commissioned officers
- 862 other ranks
Rally season, 2013
Colonel D. N. Bhutia, secretary of the Rajya Sainik Board, set out the plan at a press conference in Gangtok at the end of December 2012. The battalion would have five companies and a headquarters, and more than 80 per cent of its men would come from Sikkim. Physical and educational standards would match those of a regular infantry battalion. He gave the argument for such units in practical terms: troops in the 1962 war had struggled with language and with terrain they did not know. He also found it necessary to say that the new unit had nothing to do with the Scouts and Guides in schools.
Enrolment rallies were held in March 2013. They ran into a problem specific to the time and place. The Ministry of Defence had banned tattoos on new recruits in 2011, apart from religious symbols and names, and one local report in May 2013 counted 200 candidates turned away for them. Hopes of enrolling about 500 at the first rallies fell short.
By the time of the raising there were 319 Sikkimese recruits. These men joined separately from the regular intake of Sikkimese youth into Gorkha infantry battalions.
The flag at Lucknow
The Vice Chief of the Army Staff, Lieutenant General S. K. Singh, unveiled the flag at the 11 Gorkha Rifles Regimental Centre in Lucknow on 24 May 2013. In his address he drew the distinction on which the unit rests: other troops generally leave such altitudes after two or three years, while the Scouts would stay. Recruiting and training ran on until mid-2015, the date the Tribune had forecast, when the battalion became operational.
The link with the 11th Gorkha Rifles is formal. The Scouts use that regiment's insignia and flag with the words "Sikkim Scouts" added, and the two share a regimental centre. They were designed along the lines of the Ladakh Scouts and the Arunachal Scouts, the Army's existing locally recruited mountain units. The Tribune's 2012 report also placed the decision alongside the Kumaon, Garhwal and Dogra Scouts as part of the Army's "sons of the soil" approach.
General Bipin Rawat was Colonel of the Regiment of both the 11th Gorkha Rifles and the Sikkim Scouts, and he went on wearing the Sikkim Scouts tab on his uniform. In January 2020, when he had just become India's first Chief of Defence Staff, the news site EastMojo explained the tab to its readers: he had never served in the unit, and the tab came with the honorary appointment.
Reports from 2015 said a second battalion was then being raised. Published accounts put the regiment at about 85 per cent Sikkimese, with priority in recruitment for relatives of veterans.
At a glance
- Raised: 24 May 2013
- Regimental centre: 11 Gorkha Rifles Regimental Centre, Lucknow