" Spatial Point Process Analysis of Maoist Insurgency in India " Spatial Point Process Analysis of Maoist Insurgency in India

Maoist insurgency is considered as the single largest internal security challenge ever faced by India since its independence. Our initial analysis showed that the intensity of Maoist insurgency was high in those districts of Chattishgarh where both the education and income index components of human development index were low. This analysis concur with recent UNESCO report “Education under attack, 2010”. This means delivering the development is a crucial step to win the battle against Maoist rebels. However, it is difficult to deliver the development in high conflict region, unless we recognize the pattern of Maoist insurgency. Recently, central and six state governments together jointly started a massive counterinsurgency operation. As the battle between Maoist rebels and the Indian security forces intensified, both sides have suffered considerable losses. In this paper we presented a spatial point pattern analysis of the Maoist attack and the Maoist losses. We considered the location of events, i.e., Maoist attack or losses, as the random point and used spatial point process models, which account for randomness in the observed locations. Our analysis showed that the intensity of the Maoist attack is higher than their losses during the first four months of 2010. Keyword: Log Gaussian Cox process, Insurgency, Poisson Regression, Spatial Regression, Public Policy Management ∗Souparno Ghosh is postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, North Carolina, USA †Corresponding author: Sourish Das, SAMSI, Duke University, NC, USA. Email: [email protected]. 1