Modi to visit Maharashtra on Saturday

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Maharashtra on a day's visit where he has a series of functions lined up in Mumbai, Raigad and Pune, an official said on Tuesday.

In Mumbai, Modi will lay the foundation stones for two Mumbai Metro projects, the Elevated Railway Corridors Project and the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link project, followed by a public rally at the Bandra Kurla Complex.

Modi will also inaugurate the newly built campus of SEBI's National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM) at Patanganga near Mumbai that day.

The NISM is a state-of-the-art academic initiative of the watchdog Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), situated around 75 km south of Mumbai, in the adjoining Raigad district.

Spread across 70 acres, it performs a wide range of capacity building activities at various levels aimed at enhancing the quality standards of and increasing public participation in the securities markets.

The NISM campus has been constructed at a cost of around Rs 400 crore through the public-private partnership route. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid its foundation stone in 2013.

Presently, the NISM is operating from a building in Vashi in Navi Mumbai offering courses on capital markets and training and certification of intermediaries.

The same day, Modi will go to Pune to lay the foundation stone of the proposed Pune Metro, the third such metro rail project in Maharashtra after Mumbai and Nagpur.

Pune Mayor Prashant Jagtap has threatened to boycott the event if Nationalist Congress Party President Sharad Pawar was not invited for the Pune Metro event.

Issuing an ultimatum, Jagtap said if the central and state governments failed to change their stance by Wednesday, the Pune Municipal Corporation would organize its own foundation stone laying function on December 23, a day before Modi's event.

--IANS

qn/mr