New Maha Yuti team faces several challenges

Mumbai: As it assumes charge, the new Maha Yuti government headed by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis faces many challenges - budgetary provisions for enhancing the cash benefit scheme from the current Rs 1,500 per month to Rs 2,100 per month of the flagship Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana, reviving stalled projects like Jaitapur nuclear power park and Ratnagiri super refinery project and boosting infrastructure besides tackling the reservation issue.

Fadnavis and the two Deputy CMs Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar have a tough task cut out for the next six months.

The new Maha Yuti dispensation has indicated that the cash-benefit enhancement under Ladki Bahin Yojana, which was a manifesto promise, would be enhanced to Rs 2,100 from the next financial year 2025-26. The scheme would put a burden of Rs 45,000 crore till March 2025. Additionally, the government will have to make provisions for skill development, food subsidies, girls' education, LPG subsidies, and electricity subsidies. The state’s debt has already mounted to Rs 7.82 lakh crore - and a lot of fiscal planning needs to be done.

Two mega-projects of international standards and scale that the BJP-led Centre wants to expedite are the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Park (JNPP) of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) and the Ratnagiri Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (RRPCL) at Barsu which is touted to be the biggest super-refinery complex in the world.

The JNPP and RRPCL is facing opposition from a section of locations and it has the backing of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT). The 9,990 mega-watt JNPP is planned in collaboration with French company Areva, now taken over by Electricite De France (EDF). The RRPCL is the Rs 3 lakh crore project with a capacity of 60 million tonnes involving an Indian consortium consisting of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) that signed an MoU with Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Saudi Aramco).

One of the issues that the government is facing over one year is the Maratha reservation and OBC resistance, which will continue as far as the new dispensation is concerned.

Maratha reservation campaigner Manoj Jarange-Patil, after the Vidhan Sabha polls, has threatened to launch another agitation. In fact, Jarange-Patil has directed his attack at Fadnavis during the Lok Sabha and the Assembly polls. On the other hand, if Jarange-Patil goes in for a big agitation, the OBC Sangharsh Sena founder Prof Laxman Hake too would undertake parallel protests.

Fadnavis will also have to address farmers’ demands vis-a-vis MSP on key produce like onion, sugarcane, soybean, cotton, and grapes. The BJP had to suffer due to the ban on onion exports during the Lok Sabha elections.

The trio of Fadnavis-Shinde-Pawar would also have to speed up the infrastructure projects in the Mumbai metropolitan region, Pune, Nagpur, Nashik, Aurangabad.

The government also plans to give a major facelift to the Nashik-Trimbakeshwar where the Kumbh Mela is scheduled in 2027.