Indicating the seriousness with which Maharashtra views the Naxal threat, the state’s new police chief, A N Roy, said on Monday — in his first interview since taking over on March 1 — that it was one of the key issues on his agenda and that he would visit some of the worst-affected regions this week to take stock of the fight against the extremists.

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.

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