Nitin Gadkari laid the foundation stone for a 47-km-stretch of national highway project in Amethi (File)
It was for the first time during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee tenure that the government began proactively thinking and implementing basic social welfare schemes like those of potable water, health, education and roads, missing since Independence, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Saturday.
The Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways made the remark while laying the foundation stone for a 47-km-stretch of national highway project worth Rs 753 crore and dedicating to people four other projects in Amethi on the 96th birth anniversary of Prime Minister Vajpayee.
In a subtle dig at the Congress and Samajwadi Party, Mr Gadkari said the BJP is not a "pariwarwadi" (dynastic) party but a party of its workers and attributed his rise to the post of a Union minister to the "fact" that the "BJP belongs to its workers".
That is why, he said, "I was able to occupy a chair by the side of late Prime Minister Vajpayee" despite "not having any MLA mother or MP father" and despite being an ordinary party worker, doing the job of "painting party posters on walls" and "campaigning for the party on loudspeakers on rickshaws".
Nitin Gadkari, whom Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya described as "harbinger of road revolution in the country" and whom his Cabinet colleague and Amethi MP Smriti Irani described as the leader of Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna, also talked of how Atal Vajpayee roped him into his village road-building programme.
The minister recalled that it was Atal Vajpayee who, after seeing his road-building work in Maharashtra, asked him to prepare a report to link the country's villages with roads.
"I subsequently prepared a project report on the subject and Atal Vajpayee began its implementation," he said.
It is because of Atal Vajpayee's vision that out of 6.5 lakh villages of India, over five lakhs have been connected to the nearest towns and cities today, said Mr Gadkari.
Alleging a "dismal" situation in the education and health sector during the pre-Vajpayee era, Nitin Gadkari said in the field of education, either buildings or teachers or students remained missing and even when all three were there, the "education itself stayed missing".
"Similarly, in the health sector, either hospital or doctors and nurses or medicines used to missing, and even when all three were there, people lacked trust in them and did not go for treatment, he said.
Addressing the rally, Smriti Irani recalled that in 2014, when Nitin Gadkari had first visited Amethi, people had fervently pleaded with him that now that there was Narendra Modi government in the Centre, it must fulfil their 30-year-old demand of a bypass road for the city.
And Nitin Gadkari had promised them that he would visit Amethi again only with this gift, said Ms Irani, adding, it is not a chance that Mr Gadkari has come here again only to gift the people here the bypass road as a stretch of the national highway.
Talking of her work as Amethi MP, Smriti Irani said she was revealing it for the first time that she has been able to implement various developmental projects worth Rs 83,000 crore in Amethi during her short tenure as its MP.
Talking of a recent visit of Congress leaders Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi to Amethi, Irani said the brother-sister duo had come here saying that they will stay here for two days but returned in two and half hours only.