Development as a Counter to Extremism

If the development deficit is the breeding ground, as this chapter has argued, then development is the other half of the state’s answer to extremism, the non-coercive arm that works to drain the reservoir of grievance even as security forces confront the armed organisation.

This section surveys the area-based development interventions built for exactly this purpose. The detailed, security-linked scheme catalogue for the worst-affected zones is developed in the study of the state’s response to Left-Wing Extremism; the focus here is on the broader developmental architecture aimed at the backward and conflict-prone districts as a class.

Aspirational Districts and Aspirational Blocks Programmes

The flagship of this architecture is the Aspirational Districts Programme, launched in 2018 and steered by the national policy think-tank. It targets 112 of the country’s most backward districts, many of them in tribal and extremism-affected belts, on the conviction that lifting the districts left furthest behind is both a development and a security imperative.

Its method is captured in three words, convergence of central and state schemes, collaboration between the tiers of government, and competition among the districts themselves.

• Districts are ranked on a real-time public dashboard across dozens of indicators grouped into five themes: health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, financial inclusion and skill development, and basic infrastructure.
• Progress is measured by “delta ranking”, which rewards the *pace* of improvement rather than the absolute level, so that a district races against its own past rather than being discouraged by better-off peers.

The model’s success prompted its extension downward. The Aspirational Blocks Programme, launched in 2023, applies the same approach to around 500 blocks across the states and union territories, reaching the sub-district level where the last-mile gaps in service delivery are widest.

For internal security the significance is direct: these programmes deliberately concentrate effort on the very districts and blocks where deprivation and extremism most overlap.

Special-Area Programmes and the Backward Regions Grant Fund Legacy

The Aspirational Districts approach did not appear from nowhere; it is the latest and most sophisticated expression of a long Indian tradition of area-based, special-category development funding aimed at correcting regional imbalance.

Its most notable predecessor was the Backward Regions Grant Fund, launched in 2006-07, which channelled untied funds to around 250 backward districts to redress deficits in local infrastructure and governance. It was discontinued from 2015-16, when a larger share of central taxes was devolved to the states and the responsibility for such funding shifted accordingly.

This tradition also includes hill-area development, the border-area development programme examined in the study of border management, and the tribal-focused development plans that channel a dedicated share of resources to Scheduled Tribes.

The critical lesson of this long experience is instructive: the older special funds were often undermined by under-utilisation, leakage and poor targeting, and the shift from centrally-designed grants towards the district-led convergence of the Aspirational model reflects exactly those lessons learned. Money alone was never the answer; the binding constraint was always the capacity to spend it well.

Livelihood, Skilling and Connectivity in Conflict Districts

Beyond the flagship programmes, the state’s development response in conflict districts turns on three practical levers, each aimed at a specific deficit identified earlier in this chapter.

• Connectivity, because physical isolation is what sustains the governance vacuum. Road-building, mobile-tower projects and the extension of banking and postal services into remote areas are, in effect, the physical means of bringing the absent state back in; the specific schemes are detailed in the treatment of Left-Wing Extremism.
• Skilling and livelihood, because a young person with a trade and a wage is a young person with a stake in the mainstream. Industrial training institutes, skill-development and livelihood centres, tribal residential schools and self-help groups aim to replace the livelihood that dispossession destroyed and to shrink the pool of idle youth from which extremism recruits.
• Education, especially the residential schools that give tribal children a route into the mainstream economy without forcing them to abandon their communities.

The unifying logic is that development in a conflict district is not merely welfare; it is counter-insurgency by other means, rebuilding the bond between citizen and state that deprivation had severed.

Convergence — VB GRAM-G, FRA and PESA Working Together

The most promising idea in this entire field is also the least glamorous: not the launch of new schemes, but making the existing ones work together.

Three instruments, when implemented in genuine convergence, can regenerate tribal livelihood, security and self-governance simultaneously, and each addresses a different one of the deficits that breed extremism.

• The VB GRAM-G (earlier MGNREGA) provides guaranteed wage employment and builds durable local assets, addressing the income deficit.
• The Forest Rights Act secures individual and community rights over land and forest produce, addressing the land and livelihood deficit.
• PESA empowers the Gram Sabha to plan and decide, addressing the voice and governance deficit.

Woven together, they are transformative. A community that has secured its land under the Forest Rights Act can use MGNREGA labour to develop that very land, for water harvesting, land levelling or sustainable forest-produce cultivation, with the works planned and owned by the Gram Sabha under PESA.

In a single convergent stroke this delivers land, income and self-governance at once, precisely the antidote to the interlocking deprivation, dispossession and powerlessness that furnished the breeding ground. The obstacle, as ever in this chapter, is not the design but the implementation: schemes administered in bureaucratic silos, weak convergence on the ground, and the same resistance to genuine tribal empowerment traced in the discussion of the tribal question.

Making convergence real, more than any new announcement, is where the developmental answer to extremism now lies.

Current Status (as of July 2026) Aspirational programmes: The Aspirational Districts Programme (112 districts, since 2018) and the Aspirational Blocks Programme (around 500 blocks, since 2023) continue as the state’s principal area-based development effort, with a fresh saturation drive, the Sampoornata Abhiyan, running in 2026 to close remaining gaps in the priority indicators across these districts and blocks. Special-area funding: The Backward Regions Grant Fund was discontinued from 2015-16, its role effectively absorbed by higher tax devolution to states and the district-led convergence model; area-based development now runs mainly through the Aspirational framework and sector schemes. De-radicalisation: India still has no single national de-radicalisation policy; state-led efforts in Maharashtra and Kerala continue, drawing selectively on the Saudi, Singaporean and Danish models, and India’s overall record of resilience against transnational radicalisation, reflected in comparatively few recruits to global jihadist movements, remains a notable strength. Convergence: VB GRAM-G, the Forest Rights Act and PESA remain the key convergence levers for tribal areas, but siloed implementation continues to limit their combined impact.

Answer-Writing Perspective On radicalisation, always present it as a social process and structure the drivers on the push–pull–personal framework, citing Moghaddam’s staircase and Sageman’s networks; for the neighbourhood question, pair India’s regional exposure with its record of resilience, and stay evenhanded on the several forms radicalisation can take. On the development response, resist merely listing schemes: organise the answer around the idea that development is the grievance-draining half of a two-pronged strategy, use the Aspirational Districts model and, above all, the VB GRAM-G –FRA–PESA convergence as your analytical centrepiece, and close on the recurring theme of this chapter, that the gap is never in design but in implementation.