Roads cut through forests once controlled by armed cadres. Mobile towers rose where the state had long been absent. Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta on Sunday, 8 November 2026 shared a statement attributed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi detailing the central government's twin-track campaign against Left Wing Extremism — combining security operations with an unprecedented infrastructure and welfare drive in Naxal-affected districts.

Roads, Towers and Schools in Former Naxal Strongholds

The statement quoted by CM Gupta credits the government with constructing over 15,000 km of roads and installing more than 9,500 mobile towers in Left Wing Extremism-affected regions — areas in states such as Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Bihar that had for decades been cut off from basic connectivity. The logic is deliberate: security clearance first, then infrastructure follows.

For tribal children, the statement points to nearly 175 Eklavya Model Residential Schools opened in affected belts. The Eklavya network — central government-funded residential schools specifically for Scheduled Tribe students — received significantly expanded funding and targets from 2018 onwards, extending the reach of formal education into districts where school attendance had historically been disrupted by violence and displacement.

Jobs, Banking and PM-JANMAN in Isolated Tribal Villages

The economic plank of the push includes around 50 ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes) and 50 Skill Development Centres to draw young people away from the influence of insurgent networks and into formal employment. Thousands of post offices, bank branches and ATMs have also been opened — many for the first time — linking remote communities to formal financial infrastructure.

The centrepiece welfare initiative cited is PM-JANMAN, a central scheme announced in 2023 specifically targeting Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). Its mandate: saturate the most remote habitations with water, electricity and roads — services that thousands of villages were receiving for the very first time under the scheme.

Surrendered Naxalites and the Rehabilitation Dimension

The statement does not stop at infrastructure. It explicitly addresses those who laid down arms, noting that surrendered Naxal cadres were given opportunities and that rehabilitation schemes were designed for their reintegration. This reflects a long-standing policy thread — that the insurgency's roots in poverty and state neglect require a social answer alongside a security one.

The overarching framing invoked is 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' — 'Together with all, development for all' — presenting the LWE campaign as an expression of the broader anti-poverty mission rather than a purely counter-insurgency operation.

Successive central governments have pursued this dual-track model since at least 2010, when the Integrated Action Plan for LWE districts was launched. The current dispensation has argued that accelerating both security operations and development spending simultaneously has contributed to a measurable decline in violence across core districts over the past decade. How deep that transformation has run — and how durable — will be tested in the next annual violence data release by the Ministry of Home Affairs.