BHUBANESWAR: Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Sunday left on a three-day visit to New Delhi. He is scheduled to attend the meeting of Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected states and several programmes during his stay in the national capital.
Union Home minister Amit Shah on Monday will take a review of Maoists' activities and the ongoing fight against LWE in the affected states. The meeting assumes significance in the wake of the success achieved by security forces in Chhattisgarh where 31 Maoists were eliminated in a massive anti-Naxal operation on Friday.
Apart from Majhi, chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh will attend the meeting. Shah had last chaired the LWE review meeting with the chief ministers on October 6 last year. He had given comprehensive directions to the states with regard to elimination of LWE. The central government has set a target to root out the Naxal menace from the country by March 2026.
In the white paper tabled in the Assembly during the recent monsoon session, the state government had claimed that Maoists activities remained under control in Odisha in 2023. Three Maoist cadres were killed while 13 were arrested in the year.
Earlier, 15 districts of the state were covered under security-related expenditure (SRE) for LWE-affected areas. Presently, Kalahandi, Kandhamal, Balangir, Malkangiri, Nabrangpur, Nuapada and Rayagada are seven from the state included in the 38 LWE affected districts in the country.
Majhi is likely to meet some Union ministers and senior leaders of the BJP, and attend few other programmes during his stay in Delhi. He is scheduled to return to the state on Tuesday.
This will be his second visit to the national capital within a week. He had been in New Delhi on October 3 to hold meetings with foreign ambassadors and the business community to invite investors to the Utkarsh Odisha: Make-in-Odisha conclave to be held on January 28 and 29.