Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, facing the Opposition’s ire for taking a “three-day leave” from work with his visit to his home district (Satara), is going out of his way to emphasise that he may have been at home, but was not vacationing.
The Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) has issued a statement saying that he virtually joined a meeting at the secretariat from Satara and cleared 65 files during his three-day visit which ended Wednesday.
“The CM’s office gets files from different departments. They are disposed of in a timely manner to ensure there is no pendency. The CM is currently on a visit to Satara, but to ensure that files don’t pile up in his absence, he held a meeting with the additional chief secretary and other senior officers via video conferencing and cleared 65 files,” it said.
A source in the CMO insisted that the Satara visit was pre-planned and that Shinde, besides attending some official programmes and meeting a few people, also managed to squeeze in some hours of rest.
Opposition leaders, however, slammed the CM for taking a “leave”, supposedly sensing that a change could be on the cards and that Shinde may lose the top post to someone from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Is this true? There is news that CM Eknath Shinde has taken three days leave from work. Sources in the media say that he has taken leave as he is upset because the BJP wants (him) to switch roles in the incumbent Maharashtra government with Devendra Fadnavis,” Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) spokesperson Clyde Crasto said Tuesday.
Former chief minister Fadnavis is Deputy CM in the current Shiv Sena-BJP regime, and Shinde’s visit to Satara comes at a time when separate posters hailing Fadnavis and NCP’s Ajit Pawar as the next chief minister cropped up in Nagpur and Dharashiv, respectively.
Similarly, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut taunted Shinde Tuesday for “going on leave” at a time when residents of Barsu in the Konkan region were staging a massive agitation against the state government’s decision to shift a proposed oil refinery from Nanar in Ratnagiri district to Barsu.
Speaking to reporters in Mahabaleshwar in the Satara district, CM Shinde rubbished the allegations by Opposition leaders, saying they had no work other than levelling allegations and that he would “answer with his work”.
“I never go on leave. Today, I reviewed work of Tapola-Mahabaleshwar road, laid the foundation stone for a stretch of road and held a meeting of district officials over the infrastructure of the hill station to ensure tourists get all the facilities,” he said Tuesday.
Though he represents the Kopri-Pachpakhadi constituency in Thane district as its MLA, Shinde hails from the Dare village in Jawali taluka of western Maharashtra’s Satara district.
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What Shinde did during Satara visit
Sources close to Eknath Shinde said his visit to Satara was intended as a breather.
“On the first day, he mostly rested after reaching Satara. But over three days, he held a lot of review meetings, supervised works, held a bhoomi pujan ceremony and met people,” an official from the chief minister’s team told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
The official added, “For almost all official work, Shambhuraj Desai accompanied the CM. He also visited his fields in Satara. The local media too went with him.”
The Patan MLA from Shinde-led Sena, Desai is state excise minister in addition to being the guardian minister for Satara.
Other than resting and monitoring his farm, statements from the chief minister’s office said Shinde performed a bhoomi pujan ceremony for a road from Tapola to Mahabaleshwar in the Satara district to improve connectivity between the two tourist spots.
He also sanctioned Rs 900 crore for various development works in Satara’s Tapola-Bamnoli region, some of which will also benefit his home village of Dare. Shinde further directed officials to make the tourist spots of Mahabaleshwar and Pachgani ‘plastic-free’.
The official quoted earlier added that Shinde also chaired a district review meeting and met BJP’s Shivendra Raje Bhosale — a direct descendant of Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji — besides receiving a delegation of the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, a linguistic socio political group based in Karnataka’s Belagavi, during his visit to Satara.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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