Red Shrinks

Subhashis Mittra

The ministry of home affairs (MHA) has issued a fresh categorisation of the districts affected by left wing extremism (LWE) across 10 states, underlining the need for periodic review of the districts in order to ensure that the focus of anti-LWE efforts remains aligned to the ground realities.

The revision was carried out by the MHA after the number of such districts came down by almost half in the past nine years—that is the period when Narendra Modi held the reins as the country’s prime minister and is running for a third term on the trot.

A total of 38 districts across these 10 states have been categorised as LWE-affected with effect from 1 April 2024, compared to 75 in 2015. The categorisation of the LWE-affected districts in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana and West Bengal provides the basis for the deployment of resources under the National Policy and Action Plan, approved in 2015, to combat LWE holistically.

The Centre and the state governments have been working closely to tackle this problem, the MHA said, while sharing the list with the directors general of police (DGPs) of the states concerned. A number of interventions are being made, both security and development related, as a result of which there has been a marked improvement in the LWE scenario.

Chhattisgarh still topped the chart with 15 LWE-affected  districts, followed by Odisha (seven), Jharkhand (five), Madhya Pradesh (three), Kerala, Maharashtra, Telangana (two each), and West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh (one each), the officials said.

Of these 12 districts, seven in Chhattisgarh, two in Odisha and one each in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra are categorised as ‘most affected districts’, a terminology brought in 2015, and nine—four in Jharkhand, two in Odisha and one each in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana are categorised as ‘districts of concern’ (DoC), which was coined by the MHA in 2021.

DoC was added to the LWE terminology to ‘address the resource gap where the Maoist influence was waning’. Eight districts were categorised as DOC for two years between 2021 and 2023, and all of them have now been deleted and nine new ones have been added, according to the MHA.

The most affected district section was created in 2015 with 35 districts to ensure focused deployment of resources. Subsequently, following a review in 2018, the number of such districts was br