The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday promised to provide five crore jobs in five years to people in Maharashtra, and award the Bharat Ratna to Hindutva icon Vinayak Damodar Savarkar if the Devendra Fadnavis government is voted back to power, reported The Times of India.

The 44-page manifesto of the saffron party promised to confer the country’s highest civilian award on reformers Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule, and make Maharashtra a trillion dollar economy in the next five years. The manifesto was released by the party’s Working President Jagat Prakash Nadda and Fadnavis.

“We have put special emphasis on drought mitigation, employment generation, creating basic infrastructure and percolation of development to all sections of the society,” Fadnavis said at the event. Also present were state BJP chief Chandrakant Patil and Mumbai unit head Mangal Prabhat Lodha.

Maharashtra recorded deficit rainfall from 2014 to 2018. The BJP manifesto promised to implement several schemes to bring water to drought-prone areas and reduce their dependence on rainfall, reported News18. Among the plans are diverting 167 thousand million cubic feet of water from west-flowing rivers to drought-hit parts of Marathwada and North Maharashtra, redirecting overflow from the Wainganga river to Western Vidarbha, and linking 11 dams for the Marathwada water grid project.

The saffron party promised homes for all people by 2022 as part of the Centre’s objective to provide every by that year. The manifesto said a separate maintenance department would be set up for national and state highways. The BJP also proposed the construction of a solar power grid to be linked with all irrigation facilities in order to provide 12 hours of solar power to farmers every day.

The manifesto is silent on farm loan waiver but Fadnavis claimed that 50 lakh farmers benefited under the state government’s 2017 loan scheme.

Nadda praised Fadnavis for “changing the political culture of Maharashtra”. Earlier, the state was known to be “full of corruption” but now it was “free of corruption”, he claimed. Fadnavis’s government was stable unlike in the past, when the chief minister’s seat was a “musical chair”, Nadda added.

The Assembly elections will be held on October 21. Results for all 288 Assembly constituencies will be declared three days later.

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