The Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra is in trouble. Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and NCP and Congress have made a big issue of Vedanta-Foxcon’s Rs 1.5 lakh crore project going to Gujarat. The opposition parties of Maharashtra have made the point that one by one all the big projects of the state are going to Gujarat and thus the importance of Mumbai and Maharashtra is being reduced. It is also being propagated that one day Mumbai will also go to Gujarat or it will be made a union territory. In defense, at first the Shinde faction and the BJP tried to blame the previous government, but after Shinde’s letter surfaced, both came on the back foot and then Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that Gujarat is not in Pakistan.
However, Fadnavis knows that when there is a conflict of interest, the people of Mumbai and Maharashtra treat Gujarat like Pakistan. However, after Shinde became the chief minister, he had a correspondence with Vedanta Group owner Anil Agarwal. In his letter dated 26 July, Anil Agarwal has told Shinde that he thinks two things are important for this project. One with the consent of the center and the other with the approval of the state cabinet. In response, Shinde wrote – You will be happy to know that the Central Government is in advanced stage on both the fronts and is moving very fast. He also invited Anil Agarwal for the MoU on 29th July.
In this way the case of blaming the previous government failed. After that it has also been reported that in the last eight years many projects in Maharashtra have shifted to Gujarat. Preparations for setting up an International Financial Center in Mumbai were underway since 2007 and the state government had developed the Bandra-Kurla complex for this. But as soon as Narendra Modi’s government was formed at the center, this project went to Gujarat. Similarly, after the terrorist attack on Mumbai, preparations were being made to build the National Academy of Coastal Policing in Palghar adjacent to Mumbai and the land was also allotted but that academy also went to Gujarat and now the project of Vedanta-Foxconn is also Talegaon in Pune. went to Gujarat.
