Financially crumbled Madhya Pradesh likely to put major infrastructural projects on hold

It seems that the newly elected Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh is spoiling the hard work of several years by the previous Shivraj government. The former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh retweeted a tweet from Zee Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh which claimed that the present chief minister Kamal Nath has put the Bhopal and Indore metro projects on hold. The reasoning behind this move is said to be the high cost involved in the metro projects. As per the tweet, a presentation on Mono Rail has been prepared as it would entail a lower cost. Former Madhya Pradesh CM, Shivraj Singh highlighted how the Congress government is derailing the state from a fast-tracked development on which the state was progressing under Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

The Free Press Journal claimed that according to sources, the state government has decided to shut Metro projects in the cities of Bhopal and Indore. As per the Free Press Journal, former chief minister of MP, Babulal Gaur commented over shutting down of the metro project and said that chief minister Kamal Nath had said that the metro project would be shut down because it was quite expensive. Gaur also said that the government of the day was now talking about working on the monorail project. BJP state spokesperson, Rahul Kothari cornered the incumbent government and raised questions about the intentions of the Kamal Nath government over putting the Bhopal and Indore Metro projects on hold. He said that the gift to Bhopal and Indore, which came after immense efforts from the previous chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the permission of the central cabinet won’t be allowed to go away. Narendra Saluja, Congress coordinator has claimed that the news of putting the metro projects on hold was baseless.

While the government of the day would not like to admit that the two metro projects have been scrapped or put on hold, the fact remains that Madhya Pradesh is not in the best of financial healths under the newly elected government. The Congress had made unrealistic promises in its poll manifesto before the elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. MP manifesto included promises like waiver of loans up to 2 lakh of about 81 lakh farmers in the state, 10,000 rupees per month as unemployment benefit to youth, 51,000 rupees for the marriage of daughters of small farmers, increasing the limit of Kisan Credit Card (KCC), loan waiver to women self-help groups and so on. The cost of loan waiver itself is overwhelming when it comes to the state of Madhya Pradesh. The loan waiver in Madhya Pradesh itself would cost around Rs. 36,000 crores, which alone amounts to more than 20 percent of the budgeted expenditure of MP. Madhya Pradesh has a borrowing capacity of 60,000 crore rupees and the government has already taken loans above 50,000 crore rupees which means that the state has very little space for market borrowings.

In these circumstances, it is clear that developmental projects and schemes in the state of Madhya Pradesh are going to take a backseat. The state government will barely manage to meet the populist measures and unrealistic promises that it has made in order to score political points. The hard work done by Shivraj government in the past seems to be getting wasted under the tenure of the present government. Madhya Pradesh will soon become an example of what populism and unrealistic poll promises can do to even the most quickly developing states in the country.