Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Will Modi-Yogi shock & awe campaign work in UP polls?
Deccan ChronicleThere is a feverish inauguration spree in Uttar Pradesh in the run-up to the Assembly elections early next year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated nine medical colleges in the districts of Siddharthnagar, Etah, Hardoi, Pratapgarh, Fatehpur, Deoria, Ghazipur, Mirzapur and Jaunpur, all in Purvanchal, the eastern part of the state, on October 25. And in the same week, the Prime Minister had inaugurated other development projects worth Rs 5,200 crores, according to the Prime Minister’s Office. And to prove his point, he mentioned the seizure of illegally occupied land worth Rs 1,800 crores, provided houses for 42 lakh people, transferred Rs 5 lakh crores to the needy through Direct Benefit Transfer, 4.5 lakh jobs were given to the youth, and paying over Rs.1.43 lakh crore compensation to sugarcane farmers in his tenure of four-and-a-half years compared to Rs 95,000 crore payment made between 2007-2017 by the Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party governments. Statistics indicate that there are 96 investment proposals worth Rs 66,000 crores since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, that American giants like Microsoft and PepsiCo are setting up units in the state worth Rs 2,866 crores, and that there have been 98 investment proposals in the manufacturing sector worth Rs 13,408.19 crores, that the unemployment rate in UP in July 2021 was five per cent compared to 10.7 per cent in Maharashtra and 7.5 per cent in Kerala.