Union Home Minister Amit Shah launches ‘Vibrant Villages’ Phase 2 in Assam, govt to spend more than ₹6000 crores to upgrade 1,954 villages: Details

Vibrant Villages Programme Phase 2 launched (Image via X/himantabiswa)

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday, 20th February, launched the second phase of the Centre’s Vibrant Villages Programme from a village located along the Indo-Bangladesh border in Assam’s Cachar district. The launch took place during his two-day visit to the state, with the first leg of his tour focused on the Barak Valley region in southern Assam.

Addressing people gathered at the border village, Shah said the government is committed to ensuring that border areas get full development support. “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 the first village,” he said.

From Kibithoo to Cachar: Expanding the scheme

Shah recalled that nearly three years ago, in April 2023, he had launched the first phase of the programme from Kibithoo, a village on the Indo-China border in Arunachal Pradesh. In the first phase, 662 villages across 19 districts along the northern border, including Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh, were identified for overall development.

The second phase, launched on 20th February, has a total budget outlay of ₹6,839 crore and will run till the financial year 2028-29. According to Shah, this phase will cover 1,954 villages across 17 states and Union Territories. These include Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Out of these, 140 villages are in Assam.

“In this, many plans are there which include security-related programmes, scheme saturation programmes and connectivity programmes,” he said, explaining that the focus will be on ensuring that government schemes reach every eligible household and that infrastructure improves in these sensitive border areas.

Strong words on illegal immigration

With Assam heading towards assembly elections, Shah also spoke about illegal immigration, a major political issue in the state. He accused previous Congress governments of failing to protect Assam’s borders.

“Our Assam was troubled by two problems. One problem was that infiltrators were snatching away the rights of the 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.

Shah also highlighted the development work

Shah also used the platform to talk about development work done in Assam over the past decade under the BJP government, both at the Centre and in the state. 

“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.

More events on Shah’s Assam visit

As part of his two-day visit, Shah is scheduled to attend the CRPF’s annual day parade in Guwahati on Saturday, 21st February. He will also lay the foundation stone for the new campus of the 10th Assam Police Battalion at Sonapur, near Guwahati.

With the launch of the second phase of the Vibrant Villages Programme from Assam, the Centre has once again underlined its focus on border development, both as a security priority and as a political message ahead of the upcoming elections.

Written by OpIndia Staff
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