Prominent pro-Vidarbha activist and former Advocate-General Shreehari Aney on Wednesday demanded that the upcoming Nagpur-Mumbai Super Communication Expressway (NMSCE) be named after Mahatma Gandhi for whom Vidarbha was a 'karmabhoomi'.
"Why should the NMSCE be named after Bal Thackeray? Neither the Shiv Sena nor any of its leader did anything for the cause of (separate state) Vidarbha," Aney said in a statement.
He pointed out that the promise of the late Sena founder to create a new state of Vidarbha in eastern Maharashtra was not honoured by the party or any of his leaders.
Aney said that "the late Thackeray's name is suitable only in Mumbai or Pune" and sought to know what was wrong with the existing name, NMSCE.
The legal luminary's demand came a day after the Shiv Sena asked Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to christen NMSCE after the late Thackeray even as a section of Bharatiya Janata Party wants to name it after the late Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee.
Alternatively, Aney suggested that if the NMSCE was not acceptable, it could be simply renamed as Vidarbha Expressway as it will zip through that region.
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Public Works Department (PWD) Minister (Shiv Sena) Eknath Shinde led a delegation of party leaders to Fadnavis on Tuesday and submitted a memorandum demanding that the NMSCE be named after the late Thackeray, whose sixth death anniversary will be observed on November 17.
"Balasaheb Thackeray was the architect of the country's first-ever expressway project - the Mumbai-Pune Yeshwantrao Chavan Expressway, which came up during the tenure of the first Shiv Sena-BJP alliance government which took office in 1995," Shinde said.
The Mumbai-Pune Expressway was implemented by the then PWD Minister Nitin Gadkari and Thackeray's dream was realised in 2000 when the project was inaugurated, he said.
He added that after the first (Mumbai-Pune) expressway, the second one (NMSCE) is also destined to come up during the tenure of the BJP-Sena government and urged Fadnavis to do the needful in the matter.
A pet project of Fadnavis, the foundation stone for the NMSCE is expected to be laid soon with most of the land acquisition work completed.
The 701-km long NMSCE Greenfield Project will zip through 10 districts, 26 sub-districts and 392 villages en route, slashing travel time between Mumbai-Nagpur from the present 18 to barely eight hours.
The Rs 46,000-crore NMSCE, likely to be completed by October 2019, will get an extra boost with a proposal to twin a railway line, a first such coordinated move to execute a transportation project in the country, and the government has urged the Defence Ministry to declare it as a 'Defence industry corridor'.
It will be a part of the proposed high speed rail corridor between Howrah-Mumbai, the diamond quadrilateral rail project.
--IANS
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