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Union Home Minister Amit Shah formally launched the second phase of the central government’s Vibrant Villages programme in a village on the Indo-Bangladesh border in Assam’s Cachar district on Friday.
“In Barak Valley and all other border districts, in every village, the work of providing all kinds of facilities is going to be done by Prime Minister Narendra Modi through Vibrant Village 2. There was a time when border villages were considered the country’s last villages. They were also the last from the perspective of development, employment, electricity connectivity and education. Modi ji had in Vibrant Villages 1 decided that border villages are not the last villages but India’s first villages. And because of this, this village of ours too is going to be a first village,” he said, addressing a gathering at the village.
Shah is in Assam for a two-day visit, and began his programmes in Southern Assam’s Barak Valley, where Cachar is located.
Nearly three years ago, in April 2023, he had launched the first phase of the Vibrant Villages programme in the Indo-China border village of Kibithoo in Arunachal Pradesh. In that first phase, 662 villages had been identified for comprehensive development in 19 districts along the northern border in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh.
The second phase that was launched on Friday, with a total outlay of Rs 6839 crore till the financial year 2028-2029, aims to cover a total of 1,954 villages in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, J&K, Ladakh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, Shah said.
He said 140 of these villages are located in Assam. “In this, many plans are there which include security-related programmes, scheme saturation programmes and connectivity programmes,” he said.
Referring to the upcoming assembly elections in the state, he again emphasised the BJP’s poll plank of standing against illegal immigration into the state.
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“Our Assam was troubled by two problems. One problem was that infiltrators were snatching away the rights of Assamese people. Should infiltrators be stopped or not? Congress governments had left our borders open for infiltrators. Infiltrators kept entering Assam, and by snatching away Assam’s youths’ employment, the grains of the poor, the land in villages, there was an effort to change the demography here. But Asam’s people had made a BJP government 10 years ago, and in the first five years, we worked to stop the infiltrators. And in the next five years, our Himanta Biswa Sarma has worked to remove infiltrators by vacating the lakhs of bighas of land captured by them… Now elections are coming for the third time, make a BJP government, I promise you that we will search every infiltrator who had entered during Congress’s rule and send them back to where they came from,” he said.
He also emphasised development work undertaken by the government, especially on road connectivity.
“Congress ruled for years, but they did nothing for Assam’s progress. In 10 years, we did what Congress didn’t do in 50 years. In the last five years, every day in Assam, 14 kilometres of road have been built. And in the whole country, it is the state in which the most roads have been built. More than 24,000 km of roads have been upgraded. Thousands of small bridges have been made, and four big bridges have been made in the last 10 years by the double-engine government… In 2013-2014, Assam’s per capita income was Rs. 49,000, and in 2025-2026, it increased threefold and became Rs. 1.54 lakh,” he said.
As part of his programme in Assam, Shah will attend the CRPF’s annual day parade in Guwahati on Saturday and lay the foundation stone for the new campus of the 10th Assam Police Battalion in Sonapur near Guwahati.
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