The Prime Minister will start his public engagements by inaugurating the country’s longest river bridge the Dhola Sadhiya Bridge in Tinsukia district around 10:45 am. The 9.15 km-long bridge built over the Brahmaputra River will reduce travel time between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh by at least four hours.
Next, he will lay the foundation stone of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) Assam at Gogamukh in Dhemaji district around noon. At around 3 pm, he will lay the foundation stone of an All India Institute of Medical Sciences or AIIMS in a ceremony at the Sarusajai stadium in Guwahati.
The events in Guwahati will be the first of the five programmes that PM Modi is expected to personally lead as part of the celebrations for completing three years in office.
The high point of the celebrations will be a series of festivals titled MODI Fests (Making of Developing India Festivals), which allow the BJP to push the Prime Minister’s name while also acronym-ing, a favourite tactic of the party.
BJP Chief Ministers and their deputies will participate in MODI Fests in the capital of their states. Events will be held in about 900 cities across the country between today to June 15 to highlight the achievements in the three years of the central government.
The festivals will be organised by state governments; apart from presentations highlighting key government policies and accomplishments, caps and leaflets about large welfare schemes will be shared.
For its second anniversary last year, the government, having lost crucial elections in Delhi and Bihar, was a little subdued. This year, the outsize win in Uttar Pradesh and the popular support for demonetisation has led to a considerable scaling up of messaging. BJP chief Amit Shah said yesterday that they should first answer what they did while in power for decades.
“Some people are asking what did the Narendra Modi government do? I want to say, it did in three years what all governments did not do in 70 years,” he said, in an apparent reference to the Congress which has ruled India for the majority of the years since independence.
