A serpentine queue for rice outside the Sijua panchayat office. (Pradip Sanyal)

Lalgarh, June 30: The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government knows development has to be the priority to bring normality back in Lalgarh, but the local administration is hamstrung in a trouble zone where not too many officials want to work.

Out of a sanctioned strength of 51, the Binpur I block office has only 26 personnel, with key officers for panchayat and rural development missing for months.

“Lack of personnel is a big problem and it is difficult to roll out development projects in remote areas in the absence of a proper administrative machinery,” admitted West Midnapore district magistrate N.S. Nigam.

He did not want to go into the reasons behind the vacancies, but a junior block officer said it: “Fear of Maoists.”

“Vacancies are high in most government offices in remote areas because people don’t want to go to such places. But there is an additional factor here — the threat perception.”

Out of the 10 panchayats under Binpur I, the rebels are most active in Lalgarh, Sijua and Ramgarh, the three vertices of what is known as the core area of Maoist domination.

The other thing common among the three tribal-dominated panchayats with a total population of over 60,000 is deprivation.

With the Maoist influence getting linked to the people’s discontent, the state is trying to roll out a slew of development projects and send a team of eight senior officials to the region. “We are sending the first batch tomorrow. They will camp there for a week,” chief secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti said at Writers’ Buildings.

The eight will go into tribal villages and interact with the people to understand their problems and prepare a report, which will be used to draw up an action plan.

But hefty allocations alone cannot alienate the Maoists as decades of deprivation has resulted in a complete lack of faith in the government. “Here, a development project means intervention in bits and pieces from which only a handful benefit. This results in mistrust, as in most cases the beneficiaries are loyalists of the ruling party. Then, there is always the problem of waste of government funds,” said a professor of economics in Calcutta.

For instance, a senior Sijua panchayat official claimed that projects worth over Rs 1 crore were getting implemented there, though nothing was visible on the ground.

Yesterday, Maoist action squad members melted among villagers in Sijua after attacking a paramilitary team and forcing them to retreat.

“Had the administration delivered on development, the Maoists could not have had such a strong influence,” said a sociologist. “The administration has to act now and the re-sults must be visible for it to win people’s confidence.”

But the government does not have enough people for the job. “We have requested the government to fill the vacancies immediately so we can execute the projects in a time-bound manner,” said Nigam.