While unveiling the foundation stone of the Rs 12,000 crore project of the all-weather road for the fabled Char Dham religious circuit in Dehradun on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi struck a chord with the people of Uttarakhand ahead of the crucial election by invoking the memory of thousands of pilgrims who perished in the 2013 disaster. “The project would not just prove a boon for the people of the state in terms of employment generation and tourism boost but would be a befitting tribute to those who came on pilgrimage from across the country and died in the flash flood. I feel for those who lost their near ones in the disaster. It would gladden the heart of every Hindistani to know that they can take their parents on the pilgrimage without facing the like of what happened during the monumental tragedy,” he said.
Dwelling on the present plight of the pilgrims, he said that the tour operators suggest them to keep two/ three days in hand because of the roads being landslide-prone. “Smarting under uncertainty, given the vagaries of nature and the treacherous nature of the routes, they wonder whether things would end, sans hindrance. Once the all-weather road comes up they would no longer have to grapple with uncertainty,” the PM said.
In a reference to the Chief Minister Harish Rawat's jibe that the unveiling ahead the election amounted to a political stunt, Modi said that had it been so he would have sought to hurry through things to show magic to dazzle the people, something that the CM here has been doing daily. “Now, the politicians should be wary of taking the people with a chaff. Don't go for unveiling foundations without securing adequate provisions in the budget,” he said in a roundabout jibe at the CM.
Appreciating the works the Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari has been doing, PM said that he is untiringly exploring new technologies to speed things up. “Whenever he receives information from anybody about a technology coming up he spends time with them to grasp it fully. The people here would remember him after the much-awaited road is completed,” he said.
“When a road comes up it needs cement, coal, tar, stone and the like. But more than this, it needs the people who sweat. And this people who build up things by the sweat of their brow would build a new Uttarakahand,” he said, adding that the road would give a massive boost to the state's economy by employing the people from different segments of the society in their hordes.