(LiveMint)
Credited with giving a strong fight to Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, 49-year old Dharmendra Pradhan was sworn in on Thursday in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new council of ministers. The Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament was the BJP’s face in Odisha, a key state for its rising east strategy, winning eight Lok Sabha seats compared to one in 2014. The BJP, which had won 10 seats in the 2014 Odisha assembly elections, also upped its tally to 23 seats.
With soft-spoken Pradhan at the helm of petroleum ministry, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government leveraged the marque Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), which provides free cooking gas connections to poor families, to put it on a home run in the general elections.
The Ujjwala scheme was hailed as NDA’s version of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) remained a mainstay of the BJP’s political messaging in the run up to the 17th Lok Sabha. The programme, launched on 1 May 2016, aims to safeguard the health of women and children and lays the basis for a fundamental material transformation at the bottom of the pyramid by covering 715 districts.
