PALANPUR: The money reached the bank account before the speech ended. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday released more than ₹18,690 crore under the 24th instalment of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, putting ₹2,000 each into the accounts of over 9.34 crore farmers through direct benefit transfer.
With that, the cumulative payout under the scheme since its launch has crossed ₹4.65 lakh crore. More than ₹4.47 lakh crore had gone out through the first 23 instalments.
The same morning in Banaskantha carried a second number. Modi laid the foundation stone, inaugurated and dedicated projects worth more than ₹14,400 crore, spread across agriculture, dairy, transport, rural infrastructure and child welfare. He began with a roadshow through the district.
The centrepiece is the Bharat Bovine Breeding and Research Centre at Bhildi, built at around ₹325 crore on 127 acres. It is the country's first facility dedicated to the Kankrej breed and will work on Gir, Sahiwal and Tharparkar cattle and the Mehsani, Banni, Jaffrabadi and Murrah buffalo breeds, using IVF and embryo transfer. The target is 25,000 high-quality embryos a year, with breed improvement expected to move 10 to 20 times faster.
Two Ahmedabad Metro extensions were cleared for construction. Phase 2A runs over 6 km with five stations from Koteshwar Road to the airport. Phase 2B covers 3.3 km with three stations from GIFT City to Shahpur. The Ahmedabad-Mehsana Road, State Highway 41, will go from four lanes to eight at around ₹2,600 crore.
On the farm side, 521 projects completed under the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund, worth around ₹4,950 crore, were dedicated to the nation. These include cold storage, warehouses, silos, polyhouses and processing units. Work also began on 12 horticulture clusters covering about 1.46 lakh hectares and expected to benefit over 1.3 lakh farmers, two of them in north Gujarat for potatoes.
Banas Dairy's proposed Bio-CNG plants at Tharad and Radhanpur will process 75 and 100 metric tonnes of cattle dung a day. In child welfare, 4,030 new child-friendly anganwadi centres were launched and 361 completed ones inaugurated, an ₹800 crore push expected to reach over four lakh people.
Modi also flagged off the Sabarmati-Varanasi Express and the Mehsana-Becharaji-Sabarmati MEMU.
On Saturday he will offer tributes at the Statue of Unity and open 31 tourism and infrastructure projects in Ekta Nagar worth ₹426.71 crore, before the Rashtriya Ekta Diwas programme marking Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's 151st birth anniversary.