KUALA LUMPUR: The National Service Training Programme (PLKN) 3.0 offcially begins today after seven years with over 130 volunteer trainees from all over the country reporting in at the Territorial Army’s 515 Regiment Camp here.
The trainees for the trial, aged 18 to 20, will undergo military and statehood training for 45 days till Feb 25, as part of the effort to instill patriotism, national unity and character in youth in Malaysia and to equip them with the strength to face life’s challenges through physical and mental training.
The re-implementation of the programme is being conducted in stages, and is based on the National Service Training Act (Act 628), the National Security Policy, the Defence White Paper and related policies.
After the trial period, the next phase of the programme will be conducted at 13 Territorial Army camps, 20 public universities, 33 polytechnics, 27 teacher training institutes and several public skill/industrial training institutes that will be the programme’s basic training sites throughout the country.
The PLKN was first introduced in December 2003 as a three-month programme with training modules -including physical, statehood, character building and community service – with 85,000 to 95,000 trainees annually, with an average expenditure of RM600 million annually.
It was stopped for a year in 2015 due to an expenditure rationalisation measure and reintroduced in 2016 as PLKN 2.0 with only about 20,000 trainees a year before it was abolished in August 2018.
