Naveen Patnaik Meets Narendra Modi, Seeks Special Status for Odisha

New Delhi: Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and demanded special category status for his state.

Accompanied by all 24 MPs belonging to his party, the Biju Janata Dal, or the BJD, Mr Patnaik, 67, met the Prime Minister today for the first time after the regime change at the Centre. The BJD won 20 of the 21 seats from Odisha in the Lok Sabha polls. It has another four members in the Rajya Sabha.

"We brought up a number of important demands for Odisha, including our long standing demand for special category status," Mr Patnaik told reporters after the meeting.

Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader N Chandrababu Naidu, who  is set to become the first chief minister of residual Andhra Pradesh, had earlier met Mr Modi and sought special category status for the state as well.

Mr Modi, 63, was sworn in as the country's 15th Prime Minister on May 26, and has, since then, been meeting chief ministers, governors and other functionaries. Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa will be meeting him tomorrow. (PM Modi Meets BJP Workers, Thanks Them for Party's Victory)

Taking a cue from Mr Naidu, Mr Patnaik asked the Prime Minister to grant the special category status to Odisha. He also sought a revision of mining royalty rates.

The Odisha Chief Minister's other demands included the allocation of Rs 3,160 crore in the railway budget, better port connectivity, recognising the genuine concerns of districts which are affected by floods and a hold on the Polavaram irrigation project

"The Prime Minister was quite positive to our demands. I hope they respond to the just demands of Odisha," said Mr Patnaik, adding that there had been no discussion on the BJD joining the union government.

Mr Patnaik, who was last month sworn in as the chief minister of Odisha for the fourth consecutive term, has been exerting pressure on the Centre to accede to his demand for including Odisha in the category of special category states. In 2011, he had written a letter to the then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to press for the acceptance of his demand.

"It is learnt that the Government of India has been considering to include some other states like Bihar in the list of special category states. Orissa having a very high concentration of scheduled tribes and scheduled caste communities, adverse human development indicators and high incidence of poverty needs to be declared as a special category state," Mr Patnaik said is his letter.

At present, there 11 states that enjoy  the special status. They include Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand.