Maharashtra has yet to operationalise a single permanent National Cadet Corps (NCC) training academy for its approximately 150,000 cadets, leaving military, technology and leadership training dependent on temporary spaces at schools and colleges across the state.
NCC Director General Lieutenant General Virendra Vats highlighted the infrastructure gap during a review of activities at the NCC headquarters in Pune. He said the cadets are enrolled across around 2,500 schools and colleges in all 36 districts, while seven NCC groups operate in the state. Each group, he said, should have an independent training academy, but no such academy is currently functioning in Maharashtra.
The absence of dedicated facilities means training programmes have to be organised in spaces available at educational institutions. According to Vats, this makes it difficult to maintain continuity in training. The Pune NCC group alone has approximately 20,000 cadets, and discussions with the Maharashtra government over land for an academy are continuing.
The training requirement has expanded beyond conventional drills. The NCC is introducing programmes in cyber security, drone technology, personality development, leadership, disaster management and social work as part of its evolving training agenda. These programmes require dedicated classrooms, laboratories, equipment and training areas that are not consistently available in temporary institutional premises.
Major General Vivek Tyagi, Additional Director General of the Maharashtra Directorate, said the first NCC academy in the state, inaugurated in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar last year, has not yet become operational. Cyber Defender courses have been started in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Pune and Mumbai, while drone training centres are being established in Nagpur and Mumbai.
The officials said the expansion of these new programmes is constrained by the lack of independent academies. Cyber training requires laboratories and specialised equipment, while drone training needs dedicated facilities and controlled spaces. The Maharashtra Directorate has also been pursuing the state government for additional manpower, but the effort has not yet produced the required staffing support, according to Tyagi.
An academy typically requires between 10 and 15 acres of land. The planned facilities include separate hostels for boys and girls, classrooms, parade grounds, physical training infrastructure, arms-training facilities, drone training centres and cyber laboratories. The land requirement makes academy development dependent on the availability and allocation of suitable public or institutional land.
The issue places Maharashtra behind some other states, including Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, which the officials cited as having developed stronger NCC training facilities. At the national level, there are 102 NCC groups and an estimated requirement for about 100 academies. Some academies are already operational and work is under way at other locations, but Maharashtra has not yet brought one of its planned facilities into service.
The next step identified by the Maharashtra NCC leadership is continued discussion with the state government over land and manpower for the proposed academies. Until those decisions are completed, cadets across the state will continue to rely largely on training arrangements at existing schools and colleges.
