Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde on Thursday met students from Chhattisgarh”s Narayanpura District and advised them to avoid overtures from Naxals.
Shinde interacted with about 20 children from the Naxal-affected district.
He informed the children that the central government is introducing schemes that would benefit the youth in in Naxal-hit areas.
He said emphasis would be placed on providing proper education so that children could aspire for recruitment in the administrative and security services.
Shinde described the students as ambassadors of change and democracy, and said that the future of the country was in their hands.
In 2009, Naxalites were active across approximately 180 districts in ten states of India. In August 2010, after the first full year of implementation of the national IAP program, Karnataka was removed from the list of Naxal-affected states.
In July 2011, the number of Naxal-affected areas was reduced to 83 districts across nine states.
In December 2011, the government reported that the number of Naxalite-related deaths and injuries nationwide had gone down by nearly 50 percent from 2010 levels.
The term Naxalites comes from Naxalbari, a small village in West Bengal, where a section of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) led by Kanu Sanyal,and Jangal Santhal initiated a violent uprising against the government in 1967.
————ANI