PM Narendra Modi flags off train to Mumbai, other projects

YAVATMAL/DHULE: Inaugurating a slew of projects during his tour of Maharashtra on Saturday, PM Narendra Modi presented his government's progress report and developmental agenda and stated that if the people of India had not given the NDA a strong and unambiguous mandate in 2014, the country would have been still stuck on the path of slow development.
In Pandharkawada in Yavatmal district, the PM e-inaugurated schemes including an Eklavya residential school at Kinwat in Nanded, road works and irrigation projects, flagged off the Humsafar AC train between Ajni (Nagpur) and Pune through a video link and handed over symbolic keys to beneficiaries who have got houses under the PM Awas Yojana and certificates to women beneficiaries of several other schemes.
In Dhule he flagged off the Bhusawal-Bandra Khandesh Express through a video link and laid the foundation stone
for the Dhule-Nardana new rail line and the Jalgaon-Manmad third rail line.
The development projects inaugurated on Saturday would allow Dhule to compete with Surat in neighbouring Gujarat in the next 30 years, he said.
After beginning his speech in Yavatmal in the local Banjara dialect, paying tributes to the community’s saints like Sevalal and speaking for a while in Marathi, Modi said his government had worked tirelessly for farmers and pointed to the Rs6,000 that his government would place annually directly in their bank accounts as income support and the sum of Rs3,000 offered to workers in the unorganised sector as pension.
Governor Vidyasagar Rao, CM Devendra Fadnavis, Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari and Union minister of state for home Hansraj Ahir, in whose Lok Sabha constituency in Yavatmal the rally was organized, were present.
Gadkari said, “Because of accelerated irrigation projects and aid provided by the Centre for fast-paced infrastructure projects, Yavatmal would no longer be known by its earlier label as farm-suicide capital.” Fadnavis announced a big hike in the revolving capital for women SHGs (self-help groups) — from Rs60,000 to Rs1 lakh — amid cheers from beneficiaries in the crowd.
Members of 3,000 women SHGs of Yavatmal and Chandrapur were present”, besides tribals and farmers from the region and also from neighbouring Telangana