Soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the foundation stone of the Rs12,000 crore all-weather road project competition has ensued between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party camps, both trying to outsmart each other to share the glory.
While the State BJP president Ajay Bhatt is dubbing the unveiling as a milestone in terms of employment generation and fillip to tourism, Chief Minister Harish Rawat said BJP is wrong in basking in its glory. “It is I who met then Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari to impress him on the imperative of such a project.
Besides, the former Union minister Oscar Fernandez christened the project as all- weather road long before BJP started considering it. As far as the expansion of the National Highway is concerned I appealed to the Centre to clear decks for it on July 19, 2016,” he said.
Rebutting the CM’s charge that PM Modi had found time to visit Uttarakhand when the election was on the threshold, the state BJP chief Ajay Bhatt said that PM had come after he had ensured the budgetary provision for the project he was to unveil.
“Things are already on the move now with tender being allotted for works worth Rs3000 crore. His style is unlike the CM’s. Rawat is on an inauguration spree without making budgetary provisions for them. What he is doing is election stunt while Modiji’s approach is no-nonsense,” he said. He also asked Congress to spell out the number of times their PM Manmohan Singh cared to visit the state during his tenure.