As many as 13 big-ticket projects have been announced by the Congress in Rae Bareli ever since it formed the UPA government at the Centre in 2004. Of them, as many as eight have already started operations, while identification or handover of land is in progress for the remaining. The sheer number of projects paints a picture of industrial growth and development, with a strong focus on developing the area as an institutional and educational hub. But it has definitely not been a cakewalk for the Congress to get these projects on the road, what with two successive hostile state governments trying to nip them in the bud and a complete rout in the last Assembly polls.
The Congress braved the animosity of the Samajwadi Party in its earlier avatar in 2005 when it was trying to set up India?s first National Centre for Vehicle Research and Safety on 450 acres along the Rae Bareli-Sultanpur Road. The centre was to be implemented by NATRiP.
The R100-crore project to reconstruct, analyse and investigate road accident causes in the country was scuttled by the Mulayam Singh government in 2005. And though it looked set to take off when Mayawati came to power in 2007, the gradual souring of relations between the BSP government and the Centre-state tug-of-war took a toll on this project, as well as other dream projects of the UPA chairperson?NIFT and NIPER. With the Mayawati government refusing to allot land, these projects hit a roadblock even before they could take off.
And now, seven years after being conceived, land acquisition process for NATRiP is in progress, while NIFT, forced to start functioning from the drab confines of a rented premise in a government primary school within the ITI campus, has started construction of a new campus.
The R2,000-crore rail coach factory (RCF) project, too, had its share of hiccups, with the BSP chief playing spoilsport and cancelling land allotment for RCF in Rae Bareli. However, it was only when the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court directed the state and the Centre to maintain status quo on the land allotted to the Railways for setting up a rail coach factory that land was handed over to the Railways on lease for 90 years.
How genuine was the land crunch is a topic that has been debated across both sides of the political divide many times over. But what remains to be understood is that why, despite putting in ?blood and sweat? into these two constituencies over so many years, a stunned Congress was entirely washed out in the last Assembly elections in Rae Bareli, with all the five Assembly segments going the Samajwadi Party way.
With an eye on the 2014 elections, several big-ticket announcements have been made for Rae Bareli. ?The biggest challenge for the Congress now is to retain seats in its family boroughs. And for that, it is leaving no stone unturned in working in tandem with the state government so that its projects do not face any hiccups. The bonhomie between the Akhilesh government and the Congress is evident as the state government has given free land for AIIMS and has also sanctioned an additional 190 acres for extension of the RCF project,? says a Congress insider, requesting anonymity.
Ironically, despite the hullabaloo surrounding the ?VVIP constituency?, Rae Bareli remains one of the most backward districts in Uttar Pradesh as per the Planning Commission norms, with almost 2.5 lakh people living below the poverty line. Even for health indicators, such as vaccination, out of the total 4,60,898 children between ages 0-6 in the district, only 1,30,000 have been vaccinated. Neonatal deaths in the district are 81 per 1,000 and neonatal mortality is 33 per 1,000. And interestingly, despite Sonia Gandhi asking Mulayam Singh for a personal favour of bestowing uninterrupted 24-hour power supply for both Rae Bareli and Amethi, the per capita electricity consumption in the district is a mere 30.55 kWh and only 2,16,642 households in the district, which has a total population of 3,404,004, have electricity connections. The number of industrial areas per lakh population stands at a dismal 0.30, while the number of small-scale industries per lakh population is 14.52.The CDR of Rae Bareli is 30.90, while the number of scheduled banks per lakh population is 4.89.
While the Congress? main grouse all through the last five years has been that the Mayawati government did not allow any of its projects to take off properly and deliberately created obstacles, the people of the constituency, on the other hand, feel that while they are perceived to be the ?favoured? ones, in reality, they are the ones who have to bear the brunt of an unfavourable state government, which makes sure that life in the ?Congress stronghold? is as difficult as it could be. ?It is a pity that despite all the hype surrounding the district due to its VIP stature, infrastructure development is not visible in Rae Bareli at all,? says Pawan Sonkar, a bank employee in the district, adding that while the main roads in the district are better now, the link roads are nothing but potholes.
