Budget 2021: Poll-bound states feature prominently

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Kolkata: The Union budget for 2021-22 will give special attention to the states that are bound for assembly elections this year. These states are West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and these feature prominently in the list of infrastructure projects announced on Monday. Elections will also be held in Puducherry.

Incidentally, only one of these five states, Assam, is ruled by Bharatiya Janata Party.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that among the economic corridors being planned were 3,500 km of National Highway (NH) in Tamil Nadu at an outlay of Rs 1.03 lakh crore and 1,100 km of NH in Kerala for which Rs 65,000 crore investment has been envisaged.

For West Bengal, 675 km of NH has been planned at an expenditure of Rs 25,000 crore and for Assam the length of roadwork to be undertaken is 1,300 km for an amount of Rs 34,000 crore.

The minister also pointed out that work worth Rs 19,000 crore is in progress in Assam.

Sitharaman also mentioned that the NH between Kolkata and Siliguri that runs along the length of the state of Bengal would be strengthened and broadened. These two cities of Bengal are located about 573 km apart.

In the infrastructure push that would be completed, or initiated by 2021-22 are several expressways that connect Delhi-Mumbai, Bengaluru-Chennai, Kanpur-Lucknow, Delhi-Dehradun, Raipur-Vishakhapatnam, Chennai-Salem, Amritsar-Jamnagar and Delhi-Katra.

Bengal and Assam will also benefit from Rs 1,000 crore allocation announced for the tea garden workers, especially children and women, According to NGOs and activists, a section of the workers of the tea gardens in north Bengal and Assam suffer from malnutrition.

Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha also feature among a list of states where major fishing harbours would be developed.

These fishing harbours would be developed in Petuaghat in West Bengal, Kochi, Chennai, Visakhapatnam and Paradip.

Tamil Nadu will get a multipurpose seaweed park, announced the finance minister.

One can recall that in 2018 after BJP’s victory in Tripura assembly elections, Shah remarked that the party’s best was yet to come.

“Jab tak Odisha, West Bengal aur Kerala mein BJP nahi aa jaati tab tak party ka golden period shuru nahi hoga. Karnataka mein to hum jeetenge hi,” Shah had said.

Speaking at a public rally after the budget speech, Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee claimed that her government has carried out all the development work and that the Centre would do better by transferring the funds to the state to execute more projects.