Union home secretary Govind Mohan and Intelligence Bureau (IB) chief Tapan Deka arrived in Chhattisgarh on Friday and held meetings with senior security officials to draw up the blueprint for the final assault on armed Maoists holed inside the Abujhmad forest, once dubbed a “liberated zone”, sources in the security establishment said.

“The Union home secretary and IB chief held several meetings with top security officials posted in Chhattisgarh to prepare an action plan for the final assault. They also reviewed the overall preparedness for anti-Naxal operations,” said a security official attached to the Union home ministry.

Deka has been appointed as the nodal point for all security agencies to report each and every development related to the anti-Maoist operation.

Union home minister Amit Shah, who has declared March 31, 2026, as the deadline to wipe out Naxalism from the country, will visit Chhattisgarh on June 22 to review the anti-rebel operations.

Sources said all the security agencies have been asked to work in tandem so that the government’s intention to make India Maoist-free by 2026 can be achieved.

“According to intelligence inputs, Maoist action squad members are still hiding in the Abujhmad forest. It’s just a matter of time before we launch an assault,” said a Chhattisgarh police officer.

As per the plan, the security forces will launch a pincer attack with several teams moving in from different directions to encircle them before carrying out an intense offensive.

“The strategy is to trap the Maoists so they can’t escape to states like Odisha-Jharkhand-Maharashtra corridor using the forest cover,” the security official said.

Sources said the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College in Kanker, Chhattisgarh, has been turned into a war room where senior security officials were drawing up a strategy before launching an attack.

The college is at the northern tip of the Maoist-infested Bastar region, which extends into the dense forests of Abujhmad and abuts Maharashtra and parts of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.

The Abujhmad forest, spread over 3,900sqkm, is part of the Bastar Lok Sabha constituency, where Maoists are said to have built several camps to provide arms training to recruits.

Sources said that Maoists were now believed to be confined to only a handful of places in Chhattisgarh, “particularly the Sukma-Bijapur and Abujhmad regions”.

The security forces, which launched a massive operation against the Maoists in Chhattisgarh in September-October last year, have made repeated inroads into rebel strongholds since January this year, killing nearly 300 Maoists, including key leaders.

Some Maoist leaders had initially moved towards the “MMC Corridor” — the forested areas at the trijunction of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh — to try and evade the crackdown.

However, the sizeable force deployment and regular combing operations in these areas forced them to look for an alternative escape route.

Under a plan drawn up earlier, the security forces moved deeper into the Maoist bastions of Bastar and set up forward bases and camps as part of an area-domination exercise, an official said.

He said the forces had set up nearly 300 new forward operating bases and camps in areas once considered Maoist “liberated zones”.

According to the official, these forward bases have restricted the movement of the Maoists and helped the forces carry out counter-offensives inside the rebel fortress as their stronghold areas have shrunk fast.

Last week, Shah felicitated the CRPF, Chhattisgarh Police and specialised anti-Maoist force CoBRA jawans in Delhi, who successfully carried out “Operation Black Forest” on Karreguttalu hill in Chhattisgarh between the third week of April to the second week of May.

In the “biggest ever” 21-day-long operation against Maoists, the security forces had killed 31 Maoists on Karreguttalu Hill at the Chhattisgarh-Telangana border.

Karreguttalu is an extremely difficult hilly region, approximately 60km long and 5 to 20km wide, with a very tough and challenging geographical terrain. Over the past two and a half years, the Maoists had established their base in this area, where around 300-350 armed cadres, including the technical department, took refuge.

In the last two months, as many as 104 Maoists have surrendered, 62 apprehended, and six neutralised.

The security forces also recovered 22 arms, 156 IEDs, 985 ammunitions, 27 grenades, one bomb, 18,137 detonators, .05kg explosives and 79 gelatine sticks.