Deepak Singh, VrC

Biography

Naik Deepak Singh hailed from Farunda village in the Rewa district of Madhya Pradesh, born on 15 July 1989. He enlisted in 2012 at the age of twenty-one, joining the Army Medical Corps as a nursing assistant, and on 30 January 2019 was posted to the 16 Bihar Battalion in Ladakh. During June 2020 the unit was deployed near the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh as part of Operation Snow Leopard, as tensions rose over the Galwan Valley along the route to Daulat Beg Oldie. On the night of 15 June 2020 the commanding officer of the 16 Bihar Battalion, Colonel Santosh Babu, led talks to defuse the standoff, but these turned into a brutal hand-to-hand clash as Chinese troops attacked with iron rods and clubs. In the fighting that raged for several hours along the freezing river, he and nineteen other soldiers laid down their lives for the nation. Through the seven-hour clash near Patrol Point 14 he tended the wounded under attack, saving the lives of over thirty soldiers before he himself was mortally injured. For his extraordinary courage and supreme sacrifice, Naik Deepak Singh was awarded the Vir Chakra on 26 January 2021.