Shivraj Singh Chouhan announces Mauganj as 53rd district in pre-poll gift for Madhya Pradesh

Months ahead of the crucial Assembly elections wherein the BJP is leaving no stone unturned to win another straight term, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Saturday announced the creation of Mauganj, a tehsil in Rewa, as the 53rd district in the state.

The move is apparently aimed at nipping discontent against the government over the 'lack of adequate representation' to the politically crucial Vindhya region in the state cabinet in the bud, political observers said.

The long-pending demand to create Mauganj district has gathered steam recently.

"The national flag will be hoisted in the new Mauganj district (headquarters) on August 15," Chouhan said at a function in which he virtually transferred Rs 605 crore as assistance in the bank accounts of 27,310 beneficiaries under the 'Sambal Yojana'.

Besides, the chief minister laid the foundation stones for projects worth more than Rs 738 crore, many of them in Mauganj.

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Among the new projects, 10 works worth Rs 73.56 crore would be carried out in the new district, official sources said.

Listing the merits of the Sambal Yojana, mainly aimed at catering to unorganised labourers, Chouhan said this scheme provides help from birth to death.

Blasting his predecessor Kamal Nath of Congress, Chouhan said Nath had abandoned the scheme during his 15-month stint as chief minister from December 2018 to March 2020.

The new Mauganj district, bordering Uttar Pradesh, will have four tehsils - Mauganj, Hanumana, Naigarhi, and Devtalab, sources said, adding that its population is more than six lakh.

With the creation of the new district, two Assembly segments currently held by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had gone to Mauganj. Now, Rewa district has been left with six assembly seats.

The Rewa division will now have five districts, namely Rewa, Mauganj, Satna, Sidhi, and Singrauli, while the number of districts in the Vindhya region will be eight.

Though the Vindhya region is a stronghold of the BJP, it got just one ministerial berth in the Chouhan cabinet.

In the 2018 MP assembly elections, the BJP won 24 of 30 seats in the Vindhya region whereas the Congress couldn't open its account in four districts of the region.

Recently, Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) made inroads into some pockets of this region, a development which has become a cause of worry for the BJP.

The AAP won the mayoral election in Singrauli city in the Vindhya region last year.

"People had been demanding for a long time that Mauganj be made a district. Now the people will ask for the creation of Maihar in Satna as a new district. Maihar has witnessed many protests led by local BJP MLA Narayan Tripathi for this demand," senior journalist Rajesh Dwivedi told PTI.

He said the BJP could not derive much political mileage out of the creation of Mauganj district ahead of the polls given that the people in the region feel neglected over only a single ministerial berth being allocated to the region.

"Ramkhelawan Patel was the only representation from the region. But after the demand for separate Vindhya Pradesh gained momentum, Girish Gautam was made the Speaker of the MP Assembly," Dwivedi said.

After 15 years of BJP rule, the 2018 elections in Madhya Pradesh threw up a hung Assembly, with the Congress emerging as the largest party with 114 seats in the 230-member House, but failing to win a majority.

The BJP had won 109 seats. The Congress later formed a coalition government headed by Kamal Nath. However, the dispensation collapsed in March 2020 after several MLAs of Congress defected to BJP, paving the way for the saffron party to return to power under Shivraj Singh Chouhan.