Budget 2014: RSS pleased with new names, schemes, ‘Namami Gange’ project and others included

NEW DELHI: Take that Congress: Syama Prasad Mookerji is the new Jawaharlal Nehru; and along with the founder of Jan Sangh, Deendayal Upadhyay, Jayaprakash Narayan and Madanmohan Malaviya will now lend their names to India’s key welfare schemes and projects marking the end of decades of Nehru-Gandhis dominating the nomenclature department.

The new schemes and their newer names in the maiden budget of the Narendra Modi government has the RSS elated, which was only too happy to note small, significant allocations to a host of their pet projects: Rs 500 crore for resettling Kashmiri migrants,Rs 2,037 crore for ‘Namami Gange’ project,Rs100 crore for National Centre for Himalayan Studies in Uttarakhand, and another Rs 100 crore for Van Bandhu Kalyan Yojana among the notable few. Add to this the promise to realign the UPA flagship NREGA with agriculture, a demand that tops the Sangh wishlist for rural India.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also set asideRs200 crore for Modi’s dream project — the Statue of Unity — his tribute to Sardar Vallabhai Patel. The new Syama Prasad Mookerji Rurban Mission will deliver integrated project-based infrastructure in rural areas through the PPP mode while a Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana will augment power supply to the rural areas.

The Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya New Teachers Training Programme will strive to improve the quality of education while a Jayaprakash Narayan National Centre for Excellence in Humanities will be set up in Madhya Pradesh to promote higher learning.







The FM announced Rs100 crore for development and beautification of India’s riverfronts and ghats. The riverfronts to be covered under the plan are at Kedarnath, Haridwar, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Patna and Delhi in the current financial year. The government would also allow creation of NRI funds for the upkeep of Ganga.