BANGALORE: The Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani on Monday promised to decongest cities like Bangalore by reducing migration through creation of jobs in rural areas with the help of IT, if the NDA was voted to power.Addressing a public meeting at the National College Grounds in Bangalore as part of the party’s election campaign, Advani said his party had plans to create a minimum of 1.2 crore jobs in villages at the rate of 20 jobs in each of the six lakh villages in the country. This, he noted, would check migration of unemployed youth to cities like Bangalore in search of jobs and also help reduce the pressure on urban areas.Trying to strike a chord with the people of the country’s IT capital, Advani said the NDA would use IT as an effective tool to reduce corruption in administration if voted to power. Recalling the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s statement that if one rupee was released by the Centre under welfare measures, only 15 paise would reach beneficiaries in States as there was a “leakage” in the system, he remarked that the NDA would ensure that even the beneficiaries in the States received the full one rupee by bringing in transparency and accountability through implementation of IT in administration.“If there is any party which believes in real secularism, it is the BJP,” he claimed and alleged that secularism had become a synonym for vote-bank politics for other parties. Advani accused the Congress of resorting to vote-bank politics and said, “the BJP believed in justice for all and discrimination against none.”Describing the BJP as one which believed in inclusive policies, Advani said the party-ruled States had taken steps for the welfare of Dalits. The BJP Government in Karnataka had increased allocation for the welfare of SCs and STs by three-fold, he added.He said that the elections to the Lok Sabha would change the history of India. He termed the Third Front as just a “theory” and the Fourth Front as a “farce.”
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