A CISF head constable shot dead four people with an AK-47 at a hydroelectric power project on the Sewa river in Kathua district, Jammu and Kashmir, after an argument with his colleagues. Police arrested him, and senior CISF officers have ordered an inquiry into the killings.

The shooting is not an isolated tragedy, and that is what makes it alarming. Investigators and officials looking into why such incidents keep happening point to a pattern of extreme work stress inside the Central Industrial Security Force. Between 2019 and 2025, 1,016 CISF personnel died by suicide, and 24 killed their own colleagues.

The causes, according to the reporting, are not hard to trace. Personnel face relentless work pressure, shifts of 14 to 16 hours a day, little or no rest, and years of discontent over stalled promotions that stretch across decades.

Nineteen-hour days and no time to sleep

Former CISF Additional Director General (HR) Singh says the workload keeps growing because the force is running short of people. Singh pointed to the 93,139 vacancies in the Central Armed Police Forces and Assam Rifles that remain unfilled across the country. Every empty post, he argues, pushes more hours onto the men and women still on duty.

Working hours are not stable, Singh said. At times, personnel are required to work up to 19 hours a day, and they do not get even four or five hours of sleep. The toll is physical and mental, and it builds over time.

Sometimes they are required to work up to 19 hours a day, and there is not even time to sleep for four or five hours. It affects their physical and mental health badly.

To understand what that looks like on the ground, the reporting walks through the daily routine of the Border Security Force, which works under a similar pressure. BSF personnel work two six-hour shifts a day. The first runs from 6 am to noon and the second from 6 pm to midnight.

For the morning shift, personnel wake at four or four-thirty, complete their morning routine, get dressed and collect their weapons. Phones are not allowed on duty, so family calls have to happen before the shift begins. They leave camp and reach the border outpost at least 15 minutes early.

After the first shift ends at noon, they return to camp, deposit their weapons, eat lunch and speak briefly with family. Before reporting for the second shift, they carry out maintenance work at the camp. The six-hour evening shift then ends at midnight, and they must wake again at four in the morning.

The leave problem

By that schedule, personnel are left with barely four hours between shifts to sleep, and that is before accounting for anything else. Leave is also hard to get. Even when personnel need to attend to personal matters, they are often refused time off.

That refusal sits at the center of the most disturbing detail in the report. Some suicides and some shootings of superior officers have followed cases where a senior simply did not grant leave. The reporting presents this as a recurring flashpoint rather than an isolated grievance, and it links it directly to the exhaustion that builds when rest is never guaranteed.

The numbers are hard to read in isolation. A force of this size losing 1,016 personnel to suicide over seven years, and 24 more to fratricide, points to a crisis that has been building for a long time. The Kathua shooting has pushed it back into public view, and it raises a simple question for the government: how long can the country expect security forces to keep working under conditions like these before the cost becomes impossible to ignore?