Voices in the opposition are saying that the government’s move to lay the foundation stone of the airport is aimed at garnering more votes.
On Thursday, November 25, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Noida International Airport and laid its foundation stone. Also called Jewar Airport, the project will develop into Asia’s largest airport upon completed. However, some political leaders are calling it pre-poll stunt in view of the UP elections.
There have been voices in opposition that are saying that the government’s move to build the airport is aimed at garnering more votes in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh state assembly elections.
Does the airport’s foundation only means landing votes or does it signal take-off for the progress and future development in not just UP but also other parts of north India?
The issue was discussed by Zee News Anchor Sachin Arora. Here he explains why it is wrong to link the airport inauguration with the upcoming polls.
The idea of the Jewar airport is not new and the proposal was first forwarded 20 years ago back in 2001. The Uttar Pradesh government of the time was a coalition between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with current Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh being the Chief Minister.
The proposal for the airport was forwarded to the centre after BSP chief Mayawati became the UP CM in 2002 but it did not take shape. Two decades have passed since. The UP government under Samajwadi Party (SP) CM Akhilesh Yadav mulled changing the location of the proposed airport to Agra from Noida in a big to gain electoral advantage in western part of the state. However, the airport plan failed to take off again.
The big question that needs to be answered is whether seeing the airport, which has been on paper for two decades, in electoral light is correct. Unfortunately, progress and development work in India is also seen as politically motivated.
As per a study, some or the other kind of election keeps happening in India every 4 to 6 months on average, from Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha to panchayat or Municipal Corporation polls. This means that the election machinery is always operational. This makes it convenient to link any development project to elections.
Today, the same leaders, BSP’s Mayawati and SP’s Akhilesh Yadav are standing in the frontline among the group calling the Jewar Airport foundation an electoral move. Yet the same parties declared thousands of schemes and announcements before UP assembly elections when they were in power.
In the run up to UP assembly elections in 2017, former CM Akhilesh Yadav inaugurated and laid foundation stones of schemes and projects to the tune of Rs 60,000 crore in just a couple of months. However, he could only get a few schemes running as the CM. Akhilesh Yadav laid the foundation of 910 projects in December 2016 ahead of polls but many of them saw no executive while he was the leader of the government.
There is no denying the fact that every government announces schemes and inaugurates projects costing thousands of crores in the run up to elections in a big to appeal to voters. But categorizing the Noida International Airport as one such move would be misleading as the airport’s idea was not decided a few months ago but had to wait for 20 long years. Not just Noida or UP, the Jewar Airport will serve crores of Indians as the nation’s largest airport.
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 "DNA: Noida Airport's foundation a move to appease voters ahead of UP polls?")
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