Top intelligence sources have been warning about the growing Naxal threat in Maharashtra and suspect that their frontal organisations have begun spreading their tentacles in rural Thane, an industrial district barely 100 km from the country’s financial capital.

“The Naxal issue is very important for us. Today, I held a meeting with officers concerned with the matter,” DGP Roy told The Indian Express in the interview.

“Tomorrow, I will be visiting Nagpur and Amravati ranges to take stock of the situation there. In the next four or five days, I intend to visit all Naxalite affected areas in the state, so that after asessing the situation I come to know what is required to tackle the problem.”

The comments by Roy, a former Mumbai police commissioner, come on the back of new information that Naxalites and their sympathisers are trying to infiltrate the industrial belts around Delhi, Mumbai and Pune and are trying to build urban guerrilla warfare capabilities.

Some of the information was gathered by internal security officials from a laptop seized following the arrest of a suspect in Jharkhand.

The Naxal problem has so far been restricted to a few pockets of eastern Maharashtra. Although Naxalites are officially said to be active in five districts in the region, their presence is considered notable only in two districts bordering Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

While their movement does not have the same intensity as in the neighbouring states, authorities say they cannot relax vigil as an estimated 240 extremists are known to be present in Gadchiroli alone, one of the two worst-affected districts.

However, the threat to urban centres could change the nature of the insurgency, they admit.

Intelligence sources suspect that some frontal organisations of Naxals operate in Thane’s tribal and backward taluks of Jawahar and Mokhada. These areas are densely forested and some of them are considered to be Communist strongholds.

The support for radicalism could not be termed as “full-fledged Naxal activity” and the movement is still in its “first stage”, Thane SP Naval Bajaj told The IndianExpress.

“There are so many frontal organisations which are working in the area. So, I have informed my officers to talk to people personally and remove the middlemen from the picture,” he said. “By this, we can understand the problems of the people. The problem is more a ‘socio-economic’ one at this point of time.”

While the urban parts of Thane are a part of the Mumbai Metropolitan region (MMR) and get funds for development, the rural areas are largely neglected and these differences are being exploited by some radical groups, another senior officer said.

Mumbai gets its water from dams in the district, most of them located in the tribal taluks, but residents of the tribal hamlets walk miles to get potable water.

The tribal taluks have also reported malnutrition deaths along with problems like unemployment and poverty. The threat could blow up if not handled now, officers warned.