Till last year, none of the 127 children of Gunnaur’s Chabilpur village went to school. There was no school in the vicinity and no pucca road linking the village to the main road three kilometres away. Now, the village has both.

The sleepy assembly constituency comprising 384 villages in western Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun district — one of the most backward in the state — is a classic study of how a constituency’s fortune changes when the Chief Minister is the MLA. Power supply for 20 hours to each village, 80 new schools, a first degree college, over 200 kilometres of metaled roads, a transformer and a hi-tech sugar mill all speak of recent prosperity.

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.

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