Highways minister Nitin Gadkari, who is planning to complete laying foundation stones for highways that will connect all 80 Lok Sabha seats of UP, will be in Faizabad on Feb 21
The Modi government is planning a two-lane 275-km road along the route of the 84 Kosi Parikrama, an age-old religious yatra touching the temple town of Ayodhya as it circum-ambulates six districts of Uttar Pradesh.
If all goes well, roads and transport minister Nitin Gadkari could make the announcement about the Rs 750 crore project when he visits Faizabad on December 21, according to sources. Gadkari has been touring the poll-bound Uttar Pradesh since August for laying foundation stones for roads that are likely to cover all 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
Ayodhya in Faizabad district falls on the route of the 84 Kosi Parikrama yatra, beginning and ending in Makhurha in Uttar Pradesh's Basti where the King of Ayodhya is believed to have performed "yagna" in the "treta" period. The belief is that the parikrama delivers penance from the cycle of birth and death.
With the BJP giving priority to development over temple politics in UP, the focus was on addressing concerns of basic amenities, sources said. While the new projects cannot be completed before the UP polls due early next year, government was hoping it would send the message that it was serious about development, a promise on which the BJP had swept UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Gadkari will be in the state over the next two days to lay foundation stones for a spate of projects, including one for a four-lane road on the Jagdishpur-Faizabad section. On December 20, he will be in Ambedkar Nagar for a similar programme for the Dhadra pul to Varanasi section and Allahabad for laying foundation stone for a four-lane road connecting it to neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh.
Having set himself a target of completing the exercise before the code of conduct came into force, Gadkari has already laid foundation stones for over a dozen projects, which include several highways from Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Lok Sabha constituency. His schedule has around another dozen projects. All of these would cost around Rs 40,000 crore, according to ministry sources. The elections were expected to be notified this month.
Of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state, BJP had won 71. The party was hoping to reach out across caste barriers by flaunting the Modi regime's welfare schemes. However, with demonetization dominating the narrative, some state MPs have expressed their concern about it to the BJP leadership.
Besides Varanasi, to which around eight new highway projects are linked, the ministry's foundation laying programme included projects in Lucknow, home minister Rajnath Singh's constituency, Kanpur section, where senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi is the MP, Pilibhit, union minister Maneka Gandhi's seat. At Lalganj area in Azamgarh, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's constituency, Gadkari has launched upgradation and four-lane conversion of NH-233.
While the Centre dotted the state with foundation stones, ministry sources said the state government had been cooperating with the Centre in the projects. With elections around the corner, the ruling Samajwadi Party was also in no mood for a confrontation over the issue of development of the state.
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