Indian Rescue Academy is the brainchild of its founder, Ankit Wagh, former International level swimmer and rescue expert. While working overseas, Ankit underwent many experiences which curated the need for a specialized training academy for India. It was an immediate hit amongst the senior bureaucrats and administrators from Central and State Governments who appreciated the Ankit’s zeal to save lives and work towards nation building.’
In 2015, Indian Rescue Academy was tasked to do an overall force development exercise to cultivate water rescue capability amongst the Andhra Pradesh Fire Department. The project was a resounding success and our team was able to successfully manage an event of 4.5 crore devotees whilst leading a team of 450 firemen with over 50 boats. Shri Chandrababu Naidu, CM AP recognized the great achievement and personally applauded and certified the team for its stellar performance.

 
Since then, IRA has seen multiple crests and troughs. We established a training center at Kolad in 2017 and bifurcated the training delivery into onsite and in academy formats. We worked with the States of Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Meghalaya and promoted our message far and wide. In 2018, we established a corporate back-office setup in Pune with business development, HR, procurement, resource building and finance departments to support the training operations in Kolad and Chennai.

 
In 2021 we decided to spread far and wide and commenced the training partner (dealership) program in partnership with the worl’ds oldest lifesaving organization, Surf Life Saving New South Wales (NSW) (est 1907).
We weathered the COVID 19 storm and undertook training in a fully controlled training location with extra safety precautions. We introduced a special course for Communicable Disease Control for Disaster Management. We also introduced new courses in VIP driving, maritime operations and integrated technical rescue. In 2022, IRA turned a new leaf by establishing a center of excellence at Kolad and inducting a team of experts from the Indian Navy, NDRF, IST Diving and other government institutions. 2023, saw us becoming a full member of International Maritime Rescue Federation and begin a new journey towards maritime development for search & rescue standards. We inducted a new director in Amit Ambedkar, with a background in government project scale up, who has given us the vision to vamp up the speed and work towards becoming the Most effective Rescue Training Academy in the World by 2030