PM Modi asks officials to stay overnight at border villages for comprehensive development
On April 2, PM Modi in his physical interaction with all secretaries to Government of India had unveiled the Vibrant Villages Programme and emphasized on the necessity of concerted and coordinated action by all the ministries for the comprehensive development of border villages.
With a view to comprehensively develop villages on Indian borders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked all the Ministries to depute senior officers for at least one night stay for a ground assessment of challenges and socio-economic conditions faced by people living in villages facing China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar.
PM Narendra Modi at Kutch border in Gujarat.
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On April 2, PM Modi in his physical interaction with all secretaries to Government of India had unveiled the Vibrant Villages Programme and emphasized on the necessity of concerted and coordinated action by all the ministries for the comprehensive development of border villages.
In a letter written to all the concerned secretaries on April 7, Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla has asked the ministries to depute officers for visit and night stay uib the border villages covered under Border Area Development Programme (BADP). These officers will give a practical prescription for all round development and main streaming of villages. Based on their report, the Ministry should incorporate in all their schemes focused activities for infrastructure development, economic activities promotion, and creating linkages for marketing of village products in the border villages.
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The PM has also directed for expanding the coverage of NCC schools of the border areas to inculcate values of nation building.
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The PM has also directed for expanding the coverage of NCC schools of the border areas to inculcate values of nation building.
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Home Secretary Bhalla has directed that a monthly consolidated report based on the assessment of deputed senior officers should be submitted to Department of Border Management by 10th day of every month. Instructions have also been shared with Defence Ministry and Department of School Education for immediate action forf covering schools in border areas under NCC.
While the development of border villages may be seen by many as a routine idea but the inherent plan is to strengthen the border villages by making them more economically strong and adding more muscle to the first line of defence.
The decision to develop border villages comes at a time when China has also decided to develop border villages along the 3488 km Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India as part of its Sinicization of Tibet campaign.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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