PC to review anti-Naxal Ops

Home minister P Chidambaram will talk to district magistrates of 60 naxal affected districts through video conferencing on Friday for the first time to gauge the impact of the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for naxal affected districts. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 15, 2011, 24:23:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Home minister P Chidambaram will talk to district magistrates of 60 naxal affected districts through video conferencing on Friday for the first time to gauge the impact of the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for naxal affected districts.

A bit beyond his brief as home minister, Chidambaram began to take interest in development of Naxal areas after a heated debate within the ruling Congress on combining development and policing to counter the extremism.

The Planning Commission had allocated Rs 25 crore to each of these 60 districts in December 2010 with an aim to “show results in the short term”. In all, the government has approved Rs 1,500 crore for the financial year 2011-12 but most district magistrates have expressed inability to spend the entire amount..

“The home minister has desired to review the scheme himself,” said a senior plan panel official said. Chidambaram, while announcing the scheme following approval of Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, had said he would talk to all the DMs on its implementation.

The exercise, first of its kind by the home minister, is aimed at finding out the types of works undertaken and its likely impact on the local population. Each district magistrate has been asked to come up with detailed plan of the works undertaken and its likely impact.

A committee headed by the respective district magistrate and consisting of superintendent of Police and district forest officer has been mandated to spend the money.

The funds have been explicitly provided for carrying out works of urgent importance such as construction school buildings, anganwadi centers, drinking water supply and streetlights in public places, for which money is not available in the existing Central government schemes.

The urgency of the Central government in improving basic facilities in the Naxal affected districts is apparent from the guidelines for implementing the IAP, which directs the state governments to transfer the funds to districts within 15 days of receiving from the Central government. For any delay, the state governments will have to pay interest to the districts, the guidelines said.

Although the Planning Commission has been administering the scheme, the home minister is the overall in charge of its implementation considering the security implications of left wing extremism. The scheme, in consultation with the home ministry, is aimed at checking the growing menace of naxalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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