With polls not far off, it's time to make sure the electorate knows who's got its best interests in mind -- thus figured State Health Minister Dr Daulatrao Aher, and set about making preliminary arrangements.

For starters, he's taken about 1.5 lakh notebooks -- to be given to needy students at subsidised rates -- and tried to splash nationalistic fervour all over them. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's on the cover, on the back cover is `Mother India' holding the tricolour aloft. And, at the bottom is a photograph of Aher himself.

The caption below the picture makes the intention of the entire exercise clearer: It hails Aher for establishing the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences at Nashik.

More's on the anvil. Dr Aher is to be felicitated in the presence of social worker Anna Hazare for bringing glory to Nashik by building a university. Add free health camps and cultural programmes with a local flavour, and you have the perfect start to yet another heady electionseason.

Community Service

Have power, will cultivate vote bank -- is conventional political practice, applied by parties across the spectrum. And it's usually considered the social welfare minister's job to pick out a community for deliverance.

When Babanrao Gholap (Shiv Sena) was Social Welfare Minister, he established the Akhil Bharatiya Charmakar Sangh, representing the cobbler community.

Anna Dange of the BJP who took over after Gholap's ouster, continued the good work. Dange's Maharashtra Rajya Dhangar Samaj Mahasangh was set up for the benefit of shepherds in 1992 and now has a youth wing -- the Malhar Sena -- which is organiseing a convention ``to focus attention'' on the community's demands.

These demands include, among other things, a corporation to look after the community's welfare.

Ex-minister Gholap incidentally got into trouble due to his involvement with such corporations, facing charges of fraud which eventually forced him from his post.

Troubleshooter

The newguardian minister for Nashik district, Bala Nandgaonkar, who shot into the limelight when he defeated Chhagan Bhujbal in the 1995 Assembly polls, knows a thing or two about being a town warden -- and showing it.

Last week, the Niphad tehsildar issued demolition notices to over 400 stalls in Niphad and Lasalgaon. The infuriated stall owners who took out morchas in both towns and submitted memoranda to the tehsildar, claiming the shops were in existence for the past three to four decades and hence could not be demolished.

The issue was taken up by Nandgaonkar, who reportedly met Chief Minister Narayan Rane and persuaded him to order a stay on the demolition. Nandgaonkar then rushed to Niphad and Lasalgaon the same night to announce that the shops would not be demolished. This was followed by the usual discourse on the Shiv Sena-BJP government's ``concern'' for the jobless and its ``efforts to promote self-employment.''

After all, weren't the stall owners an illuminating example of motivation andenterprise? he asked.

Nandagaonkar's list of good deeds doesn't stop here. On his way to Nashik for the first time as guardian minister, his convoy came across an accident on the Mumbai-Agra national highway. And, ``leading by example'' forever being the ideal leader's watchword, he got down to help -- incidentally in full view of the local press. The deed was recorded for posterity by the newspapers the next day.