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Journalism of Courage
The BJP’s decision to appoint senior leader Vinay Sahasrabuddhe as party’s Thane region in-charge appears to have made the Shiv Sena Shinde camp a little nervous, as Thane is the stronghold of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. The Lok Sabha seat has been with the Sena since 1996, when party founder, late Bal Thackeray, had insisted that the seat be handed to his party during discussions with late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan. Shiv Sena has since won the seat in all Lok Sabha polls except 2009, when the NCP bagged it. With Sahasrabuddhe’s entry, the Shinde Sena seems to have got the signal that BJP now wants it back. Sanjeev Naik, the NCP leader who won the seat in 2009, is with BJP now and the present MP, Rajan Vichare, is with the Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray faction. Besides, nearby Kalyan constituency is held by Srikant Shinde, the Chief Minister’s son. So the party has to reclaim the seat that was its bastion until the mid-1990s, BJP leaders argue.
Fit India Fortnight
This year, the health ministry will mark the two-week period between the Prime Minister’s birthday and Gandhi Jayanti with ‘Ayushman Mela’, during which medical colleges will organise block-level health camps and take patients in need of tertiary care to their hospitals. The villages that are free of TB, leprosy, have achieved 100% Covid-19 vaccination, and have reached saturation with Ayushman Bharat cards will be named ‘Ayushman Gram’. During this two-week period last year, the ministry had conducted a massive nation-wide blood donation drive and a campaign, urging people to adopt TB patients and provide them nutritional support under the Nikshay Mitra programme.
