Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is scheduled to be in Gujarat on March 7 and 8, will also visit Somnath temple near Veraval for “special worship”. Modi will visit the Somnath temple on March 8, coinciding with the final leg of polling in Uttar Pradesh. It will be Modi’s first visit as PM to Somnath. On February 1, 2014, Modi had inaugurated the golden shikhar of the temple as CM, months ahead of his election to the Lok Sabha constituencies of Varanasi and Vadodara. The top brass of the BJP will arrive here on Wednesday for Shree Somnath Trust’s board meeting. The members of the trust include Modi, BJP national president Amit Shah and senior leader L K Advani, who is also an MP from Gandhinagar. Secretary of Shree Somnath Trust and former IAS officer P K Laheri said that the income of the temple was currently around Rs 38-39 crore. The temple trust had deposited around six kg of gold in a public bank under the Centre’s gold monetisation scheme in September last year. The trust is chaired by former CM Keshubhai Patel. Shah is expected to arrive at Somnath on Tuesday and review some development projects which will be on the agenda the following day. Advani is scheduled to arrive Tuesday evening. Advani’s yatra from Somnath temple in 1990 had laid the foundation of the BJP in the country. One proposal of the Gujarat government that may be up for discussion at the meeting is an oceanarium proposed in the Arabian sea, about a kilometre from the temple precincts, towards Veraval, to draw more tourists to the temple town, besides pilgrims. The project, said to be the first in India, is to cover 40,000 sq metres of land, mainly for the underwater tunnel for viewing marine life. The state environment and forests department has sanctioned Rs 350 crore for the “underwater world” to be built under the World Bank-funded Integrated Coastal Zone Management Project (ICZMP). The project is now at the bidding stage, sources told this paper. The Gujarat Ecology Commission is supervising the project. Temple trust sources said that Modi will be the first PM to visit Somnath after Morarji Desai, who was also on the temple board and had visited the temple while in the highest office. “As CM, Modi used to do pooja from a farther point, but now as per the prime ministerial protocol, he will perform pooja closer to the sanctum sanctorum as President Pranab Mukherjee did,” said a source. Modi is scheduled to arrive on March 7 and visit the greenfield OPaL petrochemical complex at Dahej PCPIR in Bharuch district. He will address an “industry meet” around 3 pm, said sources at OpaL, which is jointly promoted by Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC), GAIL India and Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC). Modi will then inaugurate a new cable-stayed bridge built on Narmada in Bharuch. This bridge is expected to ease traffic jams on the National Highway (NH-8) which links Mumbai to Ahmedabad. This will be followed by a public meeting at the agricultural university in Bharuch. The next day, Modi is expected to fly to Diu and visit the Somnath temple in the morning. Later in the day, he will return to Gandhinagar to participate in a conference of women sarpanchs at Mahatma Mandir.
