Mulayam as MLA changes face of Gunnaur

Little wonder then that Mulayam Singh Yadav is going to contest from Gunnaur again and will be filing his nomination on March 28. Three years ago, Mulayam toppled Mayawati and became Chief Minister after winning a by-election from Gunnaur by a whopping 1.72 lakh votes — a record for any assembly election in the state.

“Gunnaur is basically a village constituency of 4.38 lakh people. Five thousand people live below the poverty line and the literacy rate is just 20 per cent,” sub-divisional magistrate (Gunnaur) R C Singh told The Indian Express.

A three-kilometre drive down a metaled road to Chabalipur shows how much has changed in three years. Almost every village now has a metaled road leading to it as well as electricity in Gunnaur. “We have all 127 children of this village, including 56 girls, going to the school which opened here last year. This road was also constructed last year at a cost of Rs 30 lakh. We get electricity for almost 20 hours a day, a distant dream three years ago when this village didn’t even have electricity poles,” said the headmaster of the school, Om Prakash.

According to the Basic Education Officer, as many as 50 new primary and upper primary schools have opened in Gunnaur in the last three years. A year back, Gunnaur also got its first degree college. All three primary health centres have also been converted to community health centres over the same period, meaning more doctors and a 32-bed establishment each compared to a mere 4-bedded one earlier. “We have a new x-ray machine and an ambulance. We even have a mahila hospital now,” said Dr Umesh Kumar Tripathi, who is posted at Gunnaur.

The biggest gift though has been the sugar mill, that too a high-tech one, which was inaugurated last month. Privately-run by the DSM group, the mill came up in only 10 months.

“Earlier we had little choice but to sell our produce to big agents for just Rs 60-70 per quintal. The nearest sugar mill was 55 kilometres away and we could not afford to go that far,” said farmer Jagram Yadav of Akbarpur village, taking his sugarcane-laden cart to the sugar mill. Today, he gets Rs 130 per quintal. Giving credit to Mulayam for the happy state of affairs today, Yadav added, “Netaji phir jeetenge.”