Civil Defence is a statutory system for protecting civilians, property and essential services during war, air raids, disasters and other emergencies. Its functions are the unglamorous half of national security: warning systems, evacuation support, rescue, first aid, fire-fighting assistance and protection of critical infrastructure. The Act extends to the whole of India, but the organisation is not raised everywhere — it is raised only in areas and zones assessed as tactically or strategically vulnerable to enemy attack, which is why a resident of one district may never encounter a Civil Defence warden while a resident of a border or industrial town does. Volunteers are drawn from local communities and work alongside state administrations, district authorities and local bodies. The subject sits with the Ministry of Home Affairs, whose Directorate General of Fire Services, Civil Defence and Home Guards was established on 17 November 1962, in the immediate aftermath of the India-China war, with four sections: Fire, Civil Defence, Home Guards and Communication. Home Guards are a distinct but related auxiliary force, raised and controlled by the states, that assists the police, disaster response teams and civil administration.

The announcement is a straightforward current-affairs hook onto a piece of static internal-security material that has been asked repeatedly and is poorly revised: the Civil Defence Act, 1968, its 2009 amendment, and the distinction between Civil Defence and Home Guards. Note the argument being made, because it is the analytical layer worth writing in a Mains answer. Civil Defence in India was designed around a mid-twentieth-century threat model — bombing raids on cities, blackouts, air-raid wardens. The targets named from the Red Fort were refineries, banks and data centres. That shift in threat model, from destroying buildings to disabling systems, is the reason a volunteer force needs 'modern systems' training rather than more volunteers: the skills required are closer to cyber-incident support, critical-infrastructure protection and continuity of essential services than to rescue from rubble. It also connects to the wider institutional picture — the Disaster Management Act, 2005 and the NDRF handle disasters; Civil Defence was retrofitted onto that world by the 2009 amendment rather than designed for it.