Yogi Adityanath, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, on Saturday asked officials to develop an action plan for the next 100 days, six months and a year, which would help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fulfill its promises ahead of the assembly elections. Apparently, his direction was also aimed at helping Uttar Pradesh reach $1 trillion in its economy.
Adityanath took his oath as chief minister at Lucknow’s Ekana Stadium on Friday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah, defence minister Rajnath Singh, and BJP national president JP Nadda attended the event. The swearing-in ceremony at the stadium was attended by more than 50,000 people. His first official cabinet meeting took place earlier in the day, in which he announced that the target for Uttar Pradesh is to become the number one state in the country.
‘The roadmap for the future should be prepared with teamwork and inter-departmental coordination. For this work, ‘Team UP’ will have to be engaged with full commitment. To make the state’s economy $1 trillion, 10 primary sectors should be identified,’ he was quoted as saying by ANI. According to Adityanath, the new government’s challenge is to outdo the work done by the previous government, rather than addressing the challenges of ‘mismanagement’ that they had to address when they first came to power in 2017.
‘Good governance has been established in the last five years. Now, in the next five years, our competition will be with the work of our own first term… In such a situation, the establishment of good governance has to be carried forward with more strength,’ he added. At the meeting, Adityanath announced that Uttar Pradesh’s free ration scheme would be extended for three months, benefitting 15 crore people. An amount of ?3,270 crores will be spent on the scheme.
The Adityanath 2.0 cabinet features 31 new faces, while as many as 22 ministers from the previous regime have been dropped. There are 21 ministers retained in total, including deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, who lost the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections to Samajwadi Party (SP) Pallavi Patel.
One of the prominent faces in the new cabinet is former Uttarakhand governor Baby Rani Maurya, a member of the Dalit community and the Other Backward Class (OBC). She is one of only five women in the new cabinet. Danish Azad Ansari is the only Muslim in the BJP’s cabinet from Uttar Pradesh’s minority cell.
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