Mumbai: Mr Uddhav Thackeray, as Chief Minister of Maharashtra, faces the massive task of delivering on the promises made by his party earlier. Among the major hurdles before him is the severe debt of Rs 4,00,0000 cr under which the state is reeling.
A complete loan waiver to farmers and a full meal for a measly Rs 10 were two of the important promises made by the Sena in its manifesto before the polls. Now that Thackeray is at the helm of affairs, he will have to make good on these promises.
Due to the unseasonal rainfall last month, crops covering an area of 94.02 lakh hectares suffered extensive damage, resulting in losses to the tune of `8,000 crore. More than one crore farmers have been affected by this.
According to sources, if the government decides to provide a minimum aid of Rs 10,000 per hectare to the farmers, it will have to make a provision of Rs 9,400 crore per year. If the aid is increased to Rs 25,000 per hectare, the provision will have to increase to a whopping Rs 23,500 crore per year. Even when the Fadnavis government was in power, the government at the Centre had offered aid of only Rs 6,000 crore.
With the Sena in the Opposition camp now, it will be interesting to see how much the Union government will respond to the state government’s pleas in future.
In addition to this, Thackeray will have to make his stand clear on big-ticket projects like the bullet train and the metro car shed, as party leaders have time and again expressed reservations against them.
Thackeray will also have to raise funds for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar memorial projects that will require a lot of moolah. So far, the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi, led by the Sena, has not commented on the measures it will take to solve the economic crisis.
However, more than the financial challenges, it will be the emotional and religious issues that Thackeray will have to handle with a great deal of tact, given the ideological differences between the Sena, NCP and Congress.
The BJP has already started targeting the Sena for ostensibly giving up its Hindutva agenda. The criticism is likely to reach a crescendo in the near future. While the Sena was in power the last time, it changed the names of the Aurangabad and Osmanabad districts as Sambhajinagar and Dharashiv, respectively. The Congress-NCP government later reinstated these names. It will be interesting to see whether the Uddhav Thackeray-led government will change these names again.
