Shah tells CMs to give priority to end Naxal menace
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday urged the chief ministers of Naxal-affected states to give priority to addressing the menace so that it can be eradicated within a year and sought a joint strategy to choke the flow of funds to the red ultras.
Addressing chief ministers, state ministers and top officials of 10 Naxal-hit states, Shah also said that the fight against the Maoists has now reached its final phase and it needs to be accelerated and made decisive, an official statement said. He said the death toll due to the Left Wing Extremism (LWE) violence has come down to 200 in a year.
The chief ministers who attended the meeting were Naveen Patnaik (Odisha), K Chandrashekar Rao (Telangana), Nitish Kumar (Bihar), Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh), Uddhav Thackeray (Maharashtra) and Hemant Soren (Jharkhand).
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Bhupesh Baghel of Chhattisgarh, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy of
Andhra Pradesh and Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan did not attend the meeting. Their states were represented by either a minister or senior officials.
The Home Minister urged all the chief ministers to give priority to the problem of Maoists, also called Left Wing Extremism, for the next one year so that a permanent solution can be found to the problem. Shah said it is very important to neutralise the sources of income of the Naxals.
According to sources, intensifying operations against the Naxals, action against their frontal organisations, filling up the security vacuum, choking the flow of funds to extremists and concerted action by the Enforcement Directorate, the National Investigation Agency and the state police were some of the issues discussed threadbare at the meeting.
Referring to several development initiatives taken in the Naxal-hit areas, Shah said the central government has sanctioned 17,600 km of road, out of which 9,343 km has already been constructed.