Rahul to tour 6 Mumbai-K'taka dists from Feb 24

Congress president Rahul Gandhi will tour six districts in the Mumbai-Karnataka region during his second leg of the Janaarshivada Yatra starting February 24.

The four-day tour will cover Belagavi, Vijayapura, Bagalkot, Dharwad, Gadag and Haveri districts, Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president G Parameshwara said here on Thursday.

From February 10 to 13, Rahul concluded the first leg of his tour of the Hyderabad-Karnataka region, in which he toured Ballari, Koppal, Raichur, Yadgir, Kalaburgi and Bidar districts in a specially-designed bus that he had used for campaigning in Gujarat as well. "The first leg of the Janaarshivada Yatra was successful. The route map for the second leg is yet to be finalised," Parameshwara said.

Minister hits out at BJP

In a tirade against the BJP, Agriculture Minister Krishna Byre Gowda accused the saffron party of misleading the public on the budgetary allocation for the Bengaluru suburban rail project. "The BJP tried to project the announcement of the project in the Union Budget as though they have given Rs 17,000 crore. But according to budget documents, there is an outlay of just Rs 1 crore," Gowda said, adding that the state government had about Rs 700 crore ready for spending on the project.

Gowda also said that the Centre had "rejected" the state's request to release its share of funds under the National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems (NPCA) to improvement the Bellandur and Varthur lakes.

On corruption charges levelled by the BJP against Congress leader of in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, Gowda dismissed them as "baseless." He said Kharge has not had a single black mark in his five decades of public life.