While police action is on at Lalgarh to flush out Maoists and restore the rule of law, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has already embarked upon the task of the development of Lalgarh and its surrounding areas. On Tuesday, he will send a team of eight senior IAS officers to Lalgarh who will camp there for the next six days to assess the situation and also build confidence among the people.

The eight officers will be divided into four groups of two each and be stationed at four villages - Lalgarh, Ramgarh, Kantapahari and Pirakata.

After six days, they will be replaced by another group of eight bureaucrats.

The chief minister has also set up a nine-member Task Force, headed by chief secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti, for the development of the three districts of West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia. The committee met for the first time today and chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee presided over the meeting. The departments which had been included in the Task Force included the Backward Class Welfare, Animal Resources Development, Public Health Engineering, Agriculture, Development and Planning, PWD, Health, Agri-irrigation, and Paschimanchal Unnayan.

“While the district magistrates of the three districts have been asked to prepare packages for the area’s development and income generation among the people, the secretaries who are going there will also prepare reports and the two will be combined so that a detailed package can be prepared. The package will be finally placed before the chief minister who will finalise it,” RD Meena, principal secretary, BCW, who is the member secretary of the Task Force, said after the meeting.

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