MUMBAI:Pankaja Munde, 36, the youngest minister in the Maharashtra government, has kept three baskets outside her chamber at the Mantralaya, the administrative headquarters of the state government, for various memorandums and applications her office receives every day. However, all the three baskets remain empty as the visitors insist on handing over the applications to her in person instead of putting them in the baskets.
Pankaja is grappling with the huge burden of expectations that the followers of her father, the late Gopinath Munde, have from her. Every day, hundreds of visitors throng her chamber with some request or the other. She has been finding it difficult to focus on her work because of the influx of the visitors. Visitors from the rural areas stand in long queues outside her chamber to get a chance to speak to her. Most of the times, their demands are outside the ambit of her powers.
On Thursday, she was surrounded by at least 300 women who had come from rural parts of Maharashtra. All of them had some requests for her, but most of the requests were unrelated to her departments, Urban Development and Women and Children Welfare. Pankaja firmly but politely explained to them that she could not act on their requests and directed them to the officials of the departments concerned.
“Even if I speak for a minute to a visitor I need to spend 200 minutes every day interacting with them. I think I need 24 hours more in a day to do some official work,” Pankaja said in a lighter vein.
She has tried to dodge the influx of visitors on several occasions but failed. Sometimes she leaves the Mantralaya in a hurry and asks her driver to take her to her party BJP’s state headquarters situated about one kilometre away. On the way, she deliberately asks the driver to take her to the iconic Gateway of India first to misguide her “followers”. To her surprise, all of them land up in the party office even before she gets there.
“The people love me a lot. They ask my assistants about my whereabouts and reach my destinations before me. I understand people have a lot of expectations from me because I am Munde saheb’s daughter,” Pankaja said.
She has focused on two issues to work on a priority basis. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has assigned her the task of preparing a roadmap to make 5,000 villages free from water scarcity. She also has planned major amendments in a scheme for encouraging families to save and educate the girl child.
Pankaja is all set to expand the horizons of the state government’s ambitious scheme Sukanya that works for saving the girl child. At present, only BPL families (Below Poverty Line) are entitled to enrol under the scheme. She would also like to include families above the poverty line in the scheme.
“We have noticed that the cases of female foeticide are more in APL families than the BPL families. The APL families really need to be educated on this issue,” she said.
Pankaja believes that girls should be taught some skills from age six. She has asked her department’s officials to include skill development in the Sukanya scheme. “A rangoli artist had drawn 65 shades of facial expressions of Munde saheb on his 65th birth anniversary in December last year. The women in rural areas have tremendous talent. We need to cultivate it and develop their skills,” Pankanja said.